Guitar accompaniment in DADGAD

One of the most regularly asked questions at the guitar lessons I give is “How can I join in at sessions”?

The answer is of course to learn the tunes but, there are starting points that can help. With a little practice, a guitar player can fairly quickly learn how to accompany fiddle tunes at the local session.

I, like many others, have found that DADGAD tuning not only gives “the right sound” but, is reasonably straight forward to navigate.

In "Starting to play in DADGAD" by Maurice Condie, I show the chord shapes and outline the sequences that I use regularly and can be used in many popular session tunes. The chords in the PDF are also the chords used in the tunes throughout this website. Audio files containing four session tune sets (8 tunes in total) is included with the PDF, together with play along videos, sheet music and chords. These can be used to learn the chord shapes and sequences in the download. The playalong videos include on-screen chord windows.

Our fiddle tune harmony arrangements and session tune collections all include sheet music with DADGAD chords.

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