Customer Reviews

1001 Blues Licks: For All Treble Clef Instruments

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This 1000 blues lick book and the 1000 jazz lick book are some of the best values on this site for practising musicians. The blues book is broken up into styles and the jazz book is broken into progressions. Licks are the next step after scales. They are real life applications of scales. The blues licks are visceral and require vibrato. The jazz licks are longer and require dexterity and accuracy. There's no tab but you can do that for yourself as a memory aid. I'm not a great music reader but these are single lines and thus not difficult to read. Once you learn how to play the lick in one position you should learn most of these licks in at least two other positions which makes them easier to translate to other keys. You can also reverse and invert them for additional color. If you love lines and phrases as much as I do I'd recommend buying both books !

I really don't understand how to use this book in any valuable way at all! Sure it provides you with 1001 possible licks that could be played over each of the three four measure sections of a standard 12-bar blues progression. But there's no indication of why or when you might want to use one instead of another. Maybe I'm missing something big here, but I played through a bunch of the licks listed, and while all of them could certainly be played, and a few of them are actually rather clever and might be worth memorizing, most are, at least as far as my ear can tell, just fairly obvious "noodlings around" with the standard blues notes and various obvious passing tones in the key at hand. In fact it seems at times like one had just played some 12-bar background for several hours, and then improvised tons of possible licks over it, and then transcribed them for the book. But that is, in essence just what one does any time ones "jams" with others. On a few lucky occasions you come up with something new and ingenious, but mostly you just play various combinations of the relevant notes, mostly minor variations of things you used before, and usually try to incorporate some phrases of the vocal melody, or any alternative chords used as well, and hope that something cool sounding will come out of it all. So, as I said I don't get it. If you want to learn THIS kind of blues riffs, instead say of some really complicated, or particular famous, riffs by some of the true masters of the form, why not just get together with a friend, or even just your tape recorder, and start messing around for a few hours until you hit upon a few new licks you like, and write those down?