Hi, I'm Kirk Lorange. I started playing guitar in 1961, back when I was an eleven-year-old Canadian kid living in Belgium. There were no teachers in the small town where I lived with my family, no books, no Internet, so I taught myself, by ear. I played and played and played, I was obsessed. I learned more and more from other players and started playing professionally when I was 20 years old in Montréal after we'd moved back to Canada. After some years of traveling and living in Europe and the UK, I moved to Australia in 1975. It wasn't long before I became one of Sydney's busier session musicians, playing on scores of album tracks, countless TV and radio ads and many film scores. I also formed several bands, some of which are still going, and toured Australia several times. In 1984 I released an album of my tunes on the WEA Records label called 'Kirk Lorange - No Apostrophe'.
I started teaching my self-taught way of understanding music and how to view the fretboard in the mid-1980s, and after staging some workshops, and much prompting from my students, I decided to turn my mindset into a book. The course was designed mainly for those who had gotten 'stuck', those who wanted to learn the art of improvisation, who wanted to be able to invent parts on the fly, who wanted to play along with others and for those who had learned all the scales and modes they were told were essential but failed to deliver. I called the book PlaneTalk and I self-published it in 1994. I started selling it mail-order on the Internet in 1997 and continued until 2020 when I turned it into PlaneTalk Online.
I'm also a huge slide guitar fan and I play in standard and Dropped D tunings. I put together a course on that subject in 2006 and released a DVD. That same course is now available here as streaming video, along with many other stand-alone lessons.
In the early 2000s, I managed to secure the Internet domain name 'Guitar For Beginners dot Com' and created my 'Plain English Music and Guitar Course', which has always been free and I have now moved over to this new platform.
One of my favorite things is creating fingerstyle arrangements of my favorite tunes. I taught myself video editing and turned the arrangements into lessons. There are over 170 of them now, and they have all been moved over here to Guitar à Lorange.
So ... lots to learn here, all in good old plain English.
This site is a one-man/one-woman operation ... my partner of 36 years, Clancy --- she's the tech guru, the trouble-shooter, the smart one --- and me. I just play the guitar.
Thanks for dropping by!
Kirk Lorange