Blues Guitar Lessons In Your Town? Why Not Try Guitar Courses Available On The Web - A Course Review

I submitted the following search into Google - blues guitar lessons for my own town - and it returned with a couple of million results. It's true that it's the obvious choice to attempt to locate a blues guitar teacher locally who can teach you face to face, but there can be problems. You're never quite sure how good the instructor may be. On the other hand, if he is (or was) the best in his profession, he may be quite expensive - I'll leave you to imagine what an hourly rate will do to your finances.

More and more people are purchasing blues guitar lessons from the web (even though they might be looking for blues guitar lessons locally ) and of course this raises other problems, not least the fact that there are hundreds out there.

The 'Complete Acoustic Blues Guitar Course' is sweeping the internet and is rapidly becoming the standard to reach for acoustic blues tuition. The author is a working blues man, still playing blues in the clubs and on the streets of Europe. His tuition videos feature the old blues men, such as Big Bill Broonzy, Lightnin' Hopkins, Robert Johnson and Blind Blake, amongst others. The variety in style and expertise is very impressive. Read the independent review that follows to see if this way of teaching may be right for you - it's right for countless others, amateurs and professionals alike.

The Complete Acoustic Blues Guitar Course presents a series of detailed video lessons complete with full guitar tabs, which will teach you how to play acoustic blues guitar in finger style, ragtime and bottleneck guitar, in the style of the legendary blues men like Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, and Robert Johnson.

Each video lesson in the pack shows how to play blues guitar by concentrating on a complete song in a particular style, taking it section by section, then showing how to put those parts together.

Instructor and Course Author

Course instructor is a well established and respected guitarist in the acoustic blues & ragtime genre, having recorded several albums to date. He also spends a fair amount of time playing blues guitar on the streets and in the bars in Europe, and so has years of practice in performing these blues songs. Jim gives live classes mostly in Europe, where he lives, but is constantly looking for opportunties to spread his craft - look out for blues guitar lessons in your town in the months to come!

He shares his experience in the course - for example, in the lesson video for 'Key To The Highway', he presents the 'regular' & 'street' versions of this classic, with the 'street' version being aimed towards performing live. This is a wonderful way to learn how to play blues.

Let's Open The Box

The lesson pack features 36 high quality WMV or MOV video files on data-disk, together with PDF files of the full tablature to print out. Each of the videos is a complete in-depth lesson on learning a particular blues or ragtime song, for example 'Key To The Highway' (Big Bill Broonzy), or 'Crossroads' (Robert Johnson).

The data-disk format is used so that over eleven hours of detailed tuition can be compressed onto one. Simply pop the data-disk in your disk drive, click on a lesson and watch it like an ordinary video.In addition, immediately after payment, a link is provided for instant download, so that you can access some lessons while waiting for the mail man to deliver your disk.

Course Details - What Do We Get in the 'Acoustic Blues Guitar Lessons Course'?

Each lesson begins with Jim playing a complete song, at the right tempo. This is great to hear, but it can feel a bit unsetling, when you realize you'll soon be trying to play the same tune! Then the instruction starts, as Jim splits the song right down into tiny, playable parts that you can practice in your daily sessions. Additionally, he slows it right down, making it quite easy to follow along.

In the relevant sections of the lesson, the tablature or chord diagrams are shown on the screen, making it a simple matter to follow.One aspect that can be hard when you're learning to play blues guitar, is coordinating the picking action of your right hand, with changing chords and playing the right with your left. In these lesson videos, we see close ups of both the right hand picking technique and the left hand chord positions, so it can be clearly seen what's going on.

Each of the different song sections are then added together, so you can quickly make progress towards playing more complete parts of the song.In some of the lessons (for example Walkin' Blues), Jim also covers learning to play bottleneck or slide guitar, which is the basis of one of the classic 'blues' sound. The video sections on this are really clear, with nice closeups, and Jim offers some useful advice on how best to employ the bottleneck, for example, how to dampen the unwanted noise with your fretting hand, which is an essential skill to learn if you want to get the best bottleneck guitar sound.

The slide guitar lessons use an alternative guitar tuning, and Jim shows clearly how to tune each string, before we start the lesson itself. As with the other video lessons, the tablature is displayed in the lower third of the screen, showing where to use the bottleneck.

There are useful tips on singing lyrics while playing. Jim takes a single line from the verses, and shows how the words fit into the guitar part. This is great info, as it's one matter to be able to play the guitar part by itself, and something else entirely to be able to play and sing at the same time. Just having the lyrics written out isn't always enough to work out precisely when to come in with the vocals, so having this explained like this is a great help.

Support

Support for the lessons is by email, and I've always found Jim to be very responsive and quick to get back to me when I've had a question.

'Complete Blues Guitar Lessons' - Our Conclusions

I found Jim's Complete Acoustic Blues Guitar Course to be an enjoyable and accessible way to learn to play blues. I liked the way in which every lesson video is entirely focussed on learning a particular song, so that after working through all of the lessons, you finish up with a complete set of classics for your song list, as well as a great variety of picking patterns and licks that you can incorporate into other pieces. Blues guitar lessons should impart the skills to perform a complete song, and Jim's course does exactly that.

To learn to play songs in this genre of music, I think it's very important to understand how the tune should sound as a whole, before being taught each section, and that's just what you get with these lessons, with Jim playing the song at the beginning, so you can appreciate what you need to progress towards. I thought that the way the tune was divided into little parts, and slowed right down, made it easy to work on sections of the tune in a single practice session, before joining the parts together.

There are many close up shots of both the right and left hand positions on the videos, which will help you perfect each part. I found the close up shots of the left hand very useful, as just seeing the tablature or chord symbols for a section doesn't really give sufficient information on playing more complicated sections. Examining the fretting hand closeup clip over a few times really helped me here.Additionally, I liked seeing the 'street' version on the 'Key To The Highway' video, when Jim shares his experience of performing this song live. It's one thing to learn the 'regular' version, but very informative to see how to adjust the style into the 'street' version to lend your picking some more 'oomph' when performing in front of an audience.

If you can play the basic chords, and you want to get into learning some finger style/finger picking blues and bottleneck acoustic guitar, then I would definitely recommend taking a closer look at this course. You will learn how to play blues songs which will help you develop your skills as a guitarist, and these can also be very exciting sounding songs to play for people if someone asks you to play them a tune. I'm very impressed with the instant download feature, which gives instant access while waiting for disk delivery by mail.