Customer Reviews

Beginner's Blues Guitar

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As the title of the DVD suggests, this one caters to the beginner, which is unusual, because normally Fred Sokolow makes instructional DVDs for the more intermediate player. This DVD is suitable for the absolute beginner, not only for blues beginners but even for those who may have never known a chord before.

Sokolow covers mainly fundamental blues techniques in the Key of E, which includes a variety of turnarounds and some basic licks. Starting with regular strumming, which he makes more interesting by using some nice embellishments, he shows the basics of fingerstyle blues. The song selection that he uses for teaching purposes is overall good and consists of some well-known blues standards: "How Long Blues", "Baby, What You Want Me To Do", "Blues With a Feeling", "Key to the Highway", "Hesitation Blues" and the Ragtime-like tune "Call Me a Dog". A nice repertory, if learnt properly.

I found Fred Sokolow to be a good teacher and I enjoyed his teaching style. It has to be noticed, however, that Sokolow's talent as a teacher is not undisputed, at least to judge from a part of the customer reviews of some of his other DVDs. Maybe this has to do with his calm, almost dry approach. Like I said, it worked fine for me. Sokolow's singing voice, however, is not the greatest in the world, but then again, it's not his singing you should be interested in when watching this DVD. The DVD comes with a booklet that contains the tabs for the material covered in the lesson.

It is clear that in a 73 minute lesson only the most rudimentary of introductions can be given. Nonetheless, if you have worked your way through this DVD, you should be really proficient in the fundamentals of acoustic blues and have a good foundation from where to build up. I recommend this DVD to the absolute beginner.

Easy to follow instructions which shows you, how to play your first blues tunes in several keys. From strumming versions to the quite nice fingerpicking. Everything is described in detail and also written in the attached booklet. Fred is great teacher and his quite simple aproach works very well. I recomend this DVD for every begginer guitar player, who loves the blues.

Sokolow is a fantastic teacher. What's great about this video is that every song feels like a real song (unlike in much introductory-level teaching). Sokolow builds techniques gradually both between and within songs. So if you are a total beginner, he'll teach you a way to play the first song just by strumming three basic chords. Then once you have that down, he introduces a slightly more advanced strum; then once you have that down, he introduces a slightly more advanced picking technique; and so on. The result is that a total beginner can work with this video and be playing real music right away, but someone with a little more experience can move more quickly at first and still pick up something valuable. I was a little worried that this would be too basic, since I've been learning fingerpicking for about six months now. That still makes me a beginner, and my fingerpicking has been Travis-style in a folk idiom, not blues--but I didn't want to waste a bunch of time with very basic exercises. I'm having a blast with this. I highly recommend this dvd to anyone who is either a true beginner or has some experience playing in another idiom and wants to get into the blues.

As a beginning Guitarist, Fred has made me more that I could have been in a very short amount of time, I will be purcxhasing another lesson in the very near future.