About This Course

Hello and welcome.

Thank you so much for choosing this course. I’m very excited to be teaching it as we’re going to be delving into a whole world of blues guitar.

Your reasons for choosing this course may vary: You may have had a lifelong love of the blues, or simply a desire to add a bluesy flavour to your playing.

Students may enter this course at any level. If you’re an absolute beginner, I would suggest going through every lesson progressively, as I’ll be teaching this course in a step by step manner, taking you from having never before picked up a guitar, to being able to play real blues in a relatively short space of time.

If you’re an intermediate player, or even if you’ve been playing the guitar for a number of years and have perhaps been focusing on a different style of music, such as rock or classical, I would suggest skimming through the lessons until you land on something that’s new to you and progressing from there.

If I lose you at any point, even with regards to the terminology, you can certainly go back and review earlier lessons.

The core focus of this course is on classic electric blues. That’s anything from 1940s T-Bone Walker to 1980s Stevie Ray Vaughan, taking in all your favourite players in between, from Albert King, B.B. King, Freddie King, Buddy Guy, Albert Collins…the list goes on.

We’re going to be covering Chicago Blues, Texas Blues, Jump Blues, the 1960s British Blues Invasion, popularised by Eric Clapton and Peter Green; There’s also a huge series of lessons on slow blues and a comprehensive section on slide guitar.

We’re going to be learning lots of great licks, solos, phrasing ideas and rhythm guitar ideas in the styles of all of your favourite blues guitarists, as well as developing improvisation skills. We’ll be covering all of the scales, chords and expressive techniques you’ll need in order to play blues authentically and with feel.

In addition to classic blues, we’re going to be looking at other styles of music heavily influenced by the blues, such as Chuck Berry inspired rock n’ roll, rhythm and blues, blues rock, southern rock and we’re even going to dipping our toes into jazz territory.

Throughout the course, we’ll be working with a variety of grooves and tempos: from the classic shuffle, to the John Lee Hooker inspired boogie. We have well over 100 downloadable backing tracks in a variety of keys.

The chances are, you may have found yourself jamming with other musicians and invariably the jam has turned into a 12 bar blues progression and it’s always good to be able to play authentically in that style.

We’ll be learning popular blues arrangements and song structures: from the classic 12 bar blues and its many variations, to 8 bar, 16 bar and 1 chord blues.

Now, I say this to all of my students, but in order to play the blues, you need to be able to hear the blues and in order to hear it, you just need to listen.

So, I would suggest putting together a playlist of all of your favourite blues songs and listening to it everywhere you go in order to really internalise the style and the phrasing.

For now though, let’s grab our guitars and we’ll get started!

Please note: Lesson resources, such as Backing Tracks and Tab PDFs accompany each applicable lesson. If you’d prefer to grab them all from one convenient location, they can be found in the included ‘Absolute Blues Guitar Lesson Resources’ digital download bundle.

The Lesson Resources bundle also includes mp3s of every guitar solo taught in this course.

This is a handy resource! Rather than play the video lesson over and over, students may wish to download the solo studies along with a PDF of the tab/notation and learn at their own pace.

I've numbered each solo to its closest corresponding lesson.