Playing Through The Blues

A Review of Playing Through The Blues

This is one of the best, if not the best, lead guitar tutorials I've seen. It includes pretty much everything needed to create impressive blues lead guitar solos. It covers scales, patterns, licks, techniques, and a lot more.

Not only does it cover lead guitar playing, it also teaches rhythm guitar. It shows the usual 7th chords along with 9th, 11th, 13th, and altered chords to make your rhythm playing more interesting. It also shows different variations of the chords, many that I haven't seen before. It starts with simple rhythms and progresses on to more complicated ones
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The lead guitar sections teach you the major and minor blues scales and patterns and how to use them together in your solos. It shows the techniques used such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, tweedlies, and pinch harmonics. It also shows some of the common licks that you will use in your solos
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The lessons and examples are well written in two easy to understand PDFs using guitar tabs, one for the lead guitar and one for the rhythm guitar.

There are mp3 files for all the lead and rhythm guitar examples, at both slow speed and full speed.

Best of all are the videos of the lessons which you can view in Windows Media Player. Here, he goes through the lessons in detail showing some extra tips he doesn't mention in the books.  There are slow and full speed video versions of the examples.

Included as bonuses are backing tracks you can practice your new soloing skills to, turn around and ending licks, and solo examples by Eric Clapton, BB King, and Albert King.

I would definately score this ten out of ten for content and value. It's well over 2GB in size with all the videos and mp3 files. The good thing is that it's all downloadable. It's not one of those courses where you have to login to the site to watch the videos. You don't have to download it all in one go either. Good if your bandwidth is limited.

If you want to learn how to play blues guitar licks, this is definitely the course for you.

Playing Through The Blues

Unfortunately, Griff Hamlin has retired this course and the link now goes to his Blues Guitar Unleashed website. Make sure you sign up for his free lessons and take a look at his course catalog while you're there.