Blues guitar is a common starting point for new guitarists. My first ever guitar lesson was learning a 12 bar blues in A, and it’s easy to see why it’s popular way for teachers to ease their students into playing – it’s a great way to introduce many fundamentals of playing guitar, such as playing chords, scales and keeping time to a beat. Moreover, learnint to play blues guitar doesn’t just help aspiring blues musicians. The blues have heavily influenced many other genres of modern guitar music, including Rock, Pop, Folk, Heavy Metal and Jazz. This means that getting a grounding in the blues fairly essential for many aspiring players.
It’s with this in mind that I came across “Playing through the blues” by Griff Hamlin. This is a course aimed at beginner and intermediate guitarists alike, made up of written, digital and audio material and delivered digitally over the internet.
So what’s in it?
Rhythm and Chords Module
This starts off at the basics of how to put together chords, then shows you how to use them in different 12 bar blues progressions. The module then progresses to a lot of fancier stuff, such as minor blues and blues jazz progressions, detouring via some bone simple John Lee Hooker and ZZ Top inspired stuff along the way.
Lead Guitar Module
This is probably the meat of the course. It starts off with some basic blues scales, and legato playing techniques.. which are the obvious places to start. Even though it is labelled the “lead guitar” module, it actually delves into a lot of rhythm playing too, and shows how the two skills interact. I am a big fan of this approach to teaching, which is much more productive and helpful than creating a rigid and false distinction between lead and rhythm. This is a great lead guitar primer, and you will definitely be able to play blues guitar solos once you’ve worked your way to the end.
Bonus Modules
Lessons From the Masters
This has some solos from famous blues guitarists (including Eric Clapton and B.B King), along with some
audio examples. There are also “jam tracks” – the audio with only a rhythm backing, which is a nice touch for people like me who like to mess around with different variations instead of playing the same thing note for note.
Turnaround and Ending Licks
Now THIS was probably my favourite part of the course. Basically it is a “swipe file” of different ways to end a 12 bar blues progression. It includes some fairly classic licks, as well as few showing a bit of Griff’s personal touch. Very cool stuff.
Bonus Jam Tracks
These are some rhythm tracks, in a variety of different keys and tempos. The feel changes a lot too.. some are a shuffle, there are some straight up-tempo ones too, and some latin tracks too.
There are some more video bonuses, but I’m trying to write a blog post here, not War and Peace
Click here to read more about what this course includes
What I like about this course:
Griff Hamlin, the author, clearly loves playing the blues and the sense of fun and enjoyment he gets definitely comes through in all the material.
There is a “no nonsense” attitude in delivering the content. In the printed material, the audio and the video he gets right to the point every time. As the colloqiual expression goes, this course is “all beef” (My apologies to any vegetarian readers, but “all soy” just didn’t have the same ring to it 
).
I like that this product comes with a No-Questions-Asked, 100% money back 56 day guarantee. If you don’t like it, you can just get a refund. This takes all the risk out of buying the product, and shows that Griff has a lot of faith in his product. Very cool.
Griff doesn’t dumb anything down in presenting the material, but nor does he need to resort to the sort of unnecessarily technical musical thoery jargon typical of some academic textbooks. Rather he tends to describe things using terms you hear from everyday working and gigging musicians. You even get introduced to a little bit of musician’s slang from Griff.. for example, he refers to playing an accompaniment as “comping”. This is great preparation for anybody who aspires to play alongisde other musicians, whether in a full-time band or just as a casual hobby.
Last but not least, this is all great material, and so long as you use it then you WILL learn to play blues guitar.
What I don’t like about it:
There is no fingering written on the pdf sheet music. This is not a huge issue, as the entire course has video examples of all the playing and you can very easily just look at how he is fingering everything he plays. It would be nice touch though if the fingerings written in the sheet music too.
Most of this content is geared to beginner or intermediate guitarists. Advanced players who are from a non-blues background will also benefit from it, though they will power through it pretty quickly. But people who have been playing blues guitar for several years already will find that a lot of the material is old news. That said, I started playing blues 16 years ago, and I did find a few new tricks and ideas here (most of them in the bonus material).
Is it value for money?
Well – long story short – yes, it is. As far as guitar instructional materials in general go, the amount of high quality content you get here is just incredible. If you are wanting to learn to play blues on guitar, you would do well to buy it.
The sales page does compare this $47 course to the cost of the year’s worth of private lessons it would take to learn all of this material. I take issue with this comparison, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that different students learn at different rates, and the very keenest of them could probably cover all of the material in a matter of months. The other thing is that asking how much it would cost to learn this from a teacher is just not a valid comparison at all, because you’re not getting private lessons here. Even the best course will not offer you the kind of valuable feedback you get from spending time with a great teacher. It seems a shame that they feel the need to make over the top comparisons like this, as the material really is good enough to stand up on its own merits.
That problem aside, if you compare this course to other hardcopy or downloadable instructional materials you could buy with the same money, there’s no arguing that you get an enormous amount of value here. I remember when I was first learning guitar in the early 90s, well before the advent of downloadable guitar courses like this one, I was lucky enough to have my parents pay for weekly lessons from a private teacher who taught at the school I went to. I was always hungry for more things to learn though, and I often spent the few dollars I had on magazines like Guitar World, as well as the occasional instruction manual. I actually feel a little jealous of people starting out now, because the sheer AMOUNT of material you can get from some of these downloadable guitar courses, as well as the exceptional quality some of them offer, really dwarfs anything we had on offer 16 years ago.
Click here to go the sales page for “playing through the blues”..
Also consider:
At the time of publishing this is a slightly cheaper, and for the beginner on a budget it offers amazing value for money. This course covers Rock, Pop as well as Blues, so might also be a good option for people who aren’t sure they’re into blues enough to buy a course that only teaches blues guitar.
This is a backing track collection, rather than a complete blues course. It does however feature quite a lot of instructional material thrown in as a bonus. If you’ve been playing blues for a while now, and already know your way around basic major and minor blues scales and rhythm progressions, you might really dig this. The tracks themselves are very well recorded and feature a hot blues band – it’s not the cheesy computer sequenced midi stuff you sometimes see sold as “backing tracks”. They also cover an in-depth variety of different styles of blues, featuring several funk blues and bluesy jazz arrangements amongst the tracks.
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