Ready to get playing?
Fingerstyle Blues Vocabulary In E is available now for $37 and includes:
- Twelve in-depth lessons totaling over two hours of video instruction
- Line-by-line walkthroughs of every solo
- Clear, accurate downloadable PDFs with notation and tab for all six solos
- Downloadable videos for every lesson
- Unlimited streaming of every lesson
Ready to get playing?
Six Steps to Playing Fingerstyle Blues is available now for just $27. Formerly available on my Youtube channel, this updated version now includes:
- Six video lessons with over 80 minutes of instruction
- All new tab, including complete notation for dozens of short examples and every full-length example in the course
- Downloadable videos and PDFs for all the lesson material
- Unlimited streaming access to all the lesson material as well
Learn How to Add Swing and Jazz Sophistication To Your Steady Bass Blues
Add double stop licks, 6th and 9th chord voicings, swing-inspired turnarounds and jazz-blues chord substitutions to your vocabulary while learning six complete fingerstyle blues solos.
A short folk-revival digression
Once upon a time I opened a few shows for Dave Van Ronk. And while the highlight of the weekend was hearing Dave dish the dirt on the Greenwich Village folk scene over dinner, the next best thing was hearing him deliver one of his classic bits of schtick live from the stage:
“When I was a kid, I wanted to play jazz in the worst way – and I succeeded!”
The irony is, Van Ronk’s sophisticated blues arrangements on his classic 1976 album Sunday Street were a big part of what got me wondering early on, “how can I combine the hip, uptown chord voicings and turnarounds of the swing and jazz I love with the down-home grit and groove of fingerstyle blues?”
There were other examples scattered throughout the folk-revival catalogue. Stefan Grossman and John Renbourn’s instrumentals on records like Under The Volcano combined slick walking bass lines and sophisticated chord voicings with the snap of classic country blues, and Richard Saslow’s book The Art of Ragtime Guitar suggested how to approach various blues- and blues-related chord progressions with both alternating thumb and steady bass.
But blues being primarily a vocal art, instrumental examples seemed to be the exception, not the rule. I didn’t really find what I was looking for until I stumbled across a handful of solo piano recordings by Ray Bryant, James Booker and early Jellyroll Morton, all jazz musicians with deep blues sensibilities.
Tools For Blues Improvisation
I didn’t think I was really going to be able to recreate what those giants were doing at the keyboard. But it did make me long for a way to improvise at length, a means of developing chorus after chorus of solo fingerstyle blues while remaining interesting, colorful and funky. What I really wanted to do was take the sophisticated blues licks, voicings, chord substitutions and turnarounds from those blues-drenched jazz musicians and ground them in the downhome, solid groove of steady bass fingerstyle blues.
Like Van Ronk, I wouldn’t call myself a jazz musician. But over time, I worked out a vocabulary and an approach that let me play solo fingerstyle music that felt both bluesy and sophisticated, structured yet improvised. In my efforts to understand what makes the jazz version of the blues sound the way it does, I discovered ways to bring the voicings, chord substitutions and licks I liked back into my blues playing, without winding up sounding like a bossa nova guitarist doing “Autumn Leaves.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with either Brazilian music or the Great American Songbook.)
If that’s something you’d like to be able to do too, my course Fingerstyle Blues Vocabulary In E can show you the double stop and triplet-feel licks, up-the-neck 7th, 9th and 6th voicings, swing-inspired turnarounds and jazz-blues chord substitutions you need to improvise chorus after chorus of sophisticated yet downhome blues in E over a steady-bass groove.
What will you learn?
Each lesson comes in two parts. In the first part, you’ll learn the individual licks, voicings and other moves you need to build your vocabulary. In the second part, you’ll incorporate what you’ve just learned into a complete chorus of the blues. Not only does each full chorus show you how to put together the pieces of the current lesson, it also builds on what you’ve learned in previous lessons, so by the end, you understand how to mix, match, combine and recombine all the new ideas you’ve learned in as many ways as you can imagine.
P.S. I love learning new stuff myself, but I do like to know what I’m getting into before I plunk my hard-earned shekels down. If that’s you too, take the time to watch the fourth solo lesson from the course, "More Chords." You can hear me play the solo up to tempo at the beginning, then watch me break the solo down line by line as I take you through all twelve bars in detail so you don't miss a single move.
Learn to play your first chorus of steady-bass blues!
Start with techniques for a solid groove, add blues licks, chord voicings and turnarounds, and learn how to put it all together and make your own variations.
The Blues Dilemma
Blues instruction often takes place at one of two extremes. For some people, it’s entirely about the vibe, and they present it that way: “Here’s what I’m doing. You just have to feel it!” Then there’s the nuance school of thought. For these folks, every record is a sacred text, and if you don’t learn each scrape and stutter and slur just like it was done in 1936, you’re wasting your time.
The first approach glosses over the necessary mechanics, assuming you’ll work out right-hand coordination and left-hand fingerings on your own. The second way places so much emphasis on the details, it feels impossible you could ever play the music completely “right.” Neither approach really addresses the main reason people show up for lessons: “I like this music, and I’d like to be able to play a few things in this style.”
Short interlude for hellhounds and turntable
I had very little access to recordings of prewar blues when I was learning to play, and by the time I did, I was too scarred by my failure to conquer Sor studies and lute suites to take on any more perfectionist challenges. Instead, I listened to folk-revival pickers like Dave Van Ronk, Ry Cooder and Jorma Kaukonen, and, finding their playing more regular and their recordings literally easier to hear than those of Gary Davis, Blind Willie Johnson & Co., I set about trying to make something of a vocabulary and repertoire out of their best instrumental moments.
At the time, I wasn’t much into singing, and I couldn’t have sung those country blues songs about mules and mojos and mamas with any conviction in the first place. All I wanted to know was: what does it take to sit down and play a few choruses of the blues in E and make it sound good?
With a lot of trial and error, and just a handful of LPs, I began to map the territory: alternating thumb, steady bass. Chords up the neck in keys like E and A. Rags in C. Dropped-D tuning. Open D for slide. In time, I found myself explaining to other people how to do it, too – through articles and books for Acoustic Guitar magazine, videos for Truefire and Homespun, and the weekly lessons on my Youtube channel. Putting what I was figuring out into words (and concise, tabbed out examples), over and over, I got to clarify my take, honing a version of how to play this kind of music.
It turns out, hellhounds and black cat bones notwithstanding, playing fingerstyle blues is not really all that mystical after all. It’s something you can break down into a few key elements, which you can learn in small comprehensible pieces, and ultimately assemble into, if not an infinite number of combinations, then at least what the mathematically inclined would still refer to as “a whole bunch” of possibilities.
Play the Groove
How to consistently coordinate your fingers with an alternating or steady bass.
Know your Voicings
How to build and understand chords, and find and use them anywhere on the neck.
Use the Form
How to use 12- and 8-bar chord progressions as a roadmap for improvisation.
Find your Phrasing
How to get from “just playing scales” to a vocabulary of authentic licks and melodies.
Too many notes?
My best friend and guitar-journey compadre Peter was taking lessons for a while with a well-known modern jazz guitarist in New York. After the first or second time, I asked how it was going. “Terrible!” he said. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “We love this guy’s playing. The lessons aren’t cool?” “No,” said Peter, “it would take me two years just to work on what he showed me about the fingerboard in the first fifteen minutes!”
Once you know what you want to learn, it makes sense to go look for resources: a teacher, a book, video lessons. But sometimes you wind up with too much information. For example, you decide to learn fingerstyle blues and someone dumps the complete note-for-note transcriptions of all 29 Robert Johnson tunes in your lap. If you’re just starting out, even one such transcription, with its chorus after chorus of variations, might be too much to absorb at the beginning.
Six Steps to Playing Fingerstyle Blues
My Six Steps To Playing Fingerstyle Blues will get you started playing the blues in a direct, streamlined way. Focusing on a single groove, key and progression – a steady bass twelve-bar blues in E – you’ll learn a simple, specific way to get your thumb and fingers locked into a solid groove. Next, you’ll add essential blues licks to your groove and start to climb the neck, creating additional classic-sounding licks out of a small handful of key chord shapes. Along the way, you’ll discover how to switch chords smoothly and consistently, how to get the sound of those classic blues turnarounds, and how to put everything together into your first complete chorus of blues in E.
More importantly, when you’re done, you won’t have just one chorus of blues in E, but an overall understanding of how a fingerstyle blues is put together. By learning additional licks and how to swap them in at various points in the progression, you’ll have the creative and technical foundation to begin playing additional choruses of your own.
P.S. I love learning new stuff myself, but I do like to know what I’m getting into before I plunk my hard-earned shekels down. If that’s you too, take eleven minutes and watch the entire first lesson for free right here:
Fingerstyle Blues Vocabulary In E
If you’d like to add swing and jazz sophistication to your steady bass blues, my Fingerstyle Blues Vocabulary In E offers a practical, step-by-step approach to acquiring new licks, voicings, turnarounds and chord substitutions and incorporating all that vocabulary into complete choruses of the blues. Each lesson builds on the next, the accurate, uncluttered tab makes sure you can always see as well as hear what’s going on, and everything is downloadable, which means you can work at your own pace, from anywhere you like, for as long as you want. Behold! Click below, and all of this can be yours:
Six Steps To Playing Fingerstyle Blues
