Customer Reviews

Basic Blues Guitar: Essential Progressions, Patterns and Styles (Private Lessons / Musicians Institute)

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This is a very basic book. The lessons are simple, and even a pure beginner can start playing basic blues rhythms within a short time. I feel it necessary to emphasize that a beginning guitar student should NOT start with this book. A beginner should learn fundamentals prior to cracking this book open: fundamentals like open position chords, basic strumming patterns, and bar chords.

Although I wouldn't call it comprehensive, the book covers various blues styles: 12-bar blues shuffle, Chuck Berry style, minor blues, BB King big band blues, Kansas City style, 8-bar, slow blues, etc... There are a lot of examples. The book covers 7th chords, 9th chords and introduces 13th chords. There are a lot of practice tracts for 7th and 9th chords. There are also some single note rhythms.

The book is accompanied by a CD with 40 play along tracks that go along with each lesson.

All in all, it is a good introduction to basic blues guitar playing. I highly recommend it for beginning guitarists. An intermediate guitarist probably won't find anything in this book to be very challenging, but nevertheless it would still be a good introduction to blues.

So I am a learning "advanced" novice with a good attitude after so many years. I keep finding keys to unlock doors for me and this book is a good key. It hits some lessons I needed. I have always maintained I am as smart as most of these people who play a guitar so why not keep at it? This helped me understand what I need to do to keep on keepin' on.

This book is pretty decent at giving you a VERY basic education on blues rhythms but it's aimed at a rather small audience. This book is perfect if you've been playing guitar pretty informally for awhile and are looking to begin understanding the basics of a new style. If you are a new guitarist this book is probably a bit above you, if you've been playing for awhile and have gone through several other books... well, sadly this book is below you. I love the Musician's Institute books but this one falls way short. This is an introductory look into the style at best.