Are you interested in becoming a blues guitarist but have no idea where to start? In this review, I’m going to take a look at the Learn and Master Blues Guitar Spotlight Series, a follow up to the highly popular and successful Learn and Master Guitar course by Legacy Systems. With this course, you will find all the blues guitar lessons and resources you need to learn blues guitar. Does it work? Read on the find out.

With Learn and Master Blues Guitar, you’ll receive a set of 6 DVDs, a Jam Along DVD & CD, 2 bonus interviews with blues guitar legends Jack Pearson and Johnny Hiland, and a downloadable instructional guide. You’ll also receive access to an online forum so you can ask questions and interact with other blues guitar learners. Instructor Steve Krenz was brought back to teach this Learn and Master Blues Guitar course. As a Nashville studio guitarist, Steve has quite a bit of experience teaching blues guitar. A good guitar instructor is probably the most important part of any guitar course, and Steve definitely fits the bill here. His easy to follow teaching style which makes each blues guitar lesson simple to pick up.

As I went through Learn and Master Blues Guitar course, I was very impressed by the quality of the materials. The course covers step-by-step, everything you need to learn blues guitar. Steve first demonstrates a particular topic in detail, and then you’ll have time to practice what he just taught you. As you go through each blues guitar lesson, you’ll find helpful on-screen graphics to aid the learning process. It’s also simple to hop around so you can easily jump to a specific topic or exercise you want to practice. The course starts off with the fundamentals, and you’ll learn the basic notes, chords and forms that make up the blues. Soon though, you’ll be playing fast shuffles, slow 12/8 blues, and “blues in every key”. By the end of the course you’ll have learned many advanced blues guitar techniques and will have the confidence to start exploring the blues guitar on your own.

One of my favorite parts of the Learn and Master Blues Guitar course are the JamPlay DVD and CD. The JamPlay materials enable you to practice your blues guitar playing skills along side a real band. These aren’t some boring guitar tracks either, but a real band with real blues guitar music, featuring the likes of Dino Pastin (keyboard player for Alabama), Chris Tyrrell (drummer for Tim McGraw) and Tony Marvelli. Each of the 22 included tracks highlights a different area of playing the blues. You’ll play blues songs in different keys, styles, and tempos at a varying range of difficulties. This is one of the best ways to practice your new found blues guitar skills and I personally found them to be very fun and enjoyable.

As an added bonus, Learn and Master Blues Guitar also includes interviews with two blues guitar legends, Jack Pearson and Johnny Hiland. In these exclusive interviews, you’ll discover their signature blue guitar techniques that made these two blues legends who they are. Jack covers topics like playing the slide guitar, alternate tunings and has some great advice for beginning blues players. In Johnny’s interview you’ll learn his blues playing approach, bending and other interesting blues techniques. The interviews are a blast and blues enthusiasts will find them to be a great addition to the product.

All in all, Learn and Master Blues Guitar is probably the best blues guitar course out there. It contains all the blues guitar lessons and instruction you need to become a successful blues guitarist. The Learn and Master series of products is well known for its high quality instruction and this course is no exception. The course can be purchased online for $99 and comes with a full 60 day money back guarantee. Support is exceptional, so you don’t have to worry about that either. If you are at all interested in trying to learn blues guitar, then you definitely need to give Learn and Master Blues Guitar a try.

Blues songs and blues guitar are notable for developing certain popular styles of guitar including the innovative style of slide guitar. You won’t learn how to play slide guitar in your first blues guitar lesson but it is a style of playing that anyone interested in learning to play blues guitar should know about.

Also known as bottleneck guitar, blues guitarist Sylvester Weaver first recorded slide guitar in 1923 and it is in that decade that slide guitar became a popular facet of the Mississippi Delta Blues. Involving the use of a “slide” to apply constant pressure to the frets and produce an uninterrupted change in pitch, the slide guitar was first known as a “bottleneck guitar” because a sawed-off bottleneck was a popular item used as a slide in the 1920s. Today, bottlenecks slides are still in use but a variety of other materials including ceramic, stainless steel, brass and chrome are used in the manufacture of slides.

These slides are generally manufactured as tubes that fit over a finger on the blues guitarist’s non-dominant hand but some guitarists still use knives or bottlenecks as slides. Regardless of the slide you choose, it’s possible to play slide guitar on any type of acoustic or electric guitar – some blues guitarists are even experimenting with using the slide guitar technique with bass guitars. Although any guitar will do, resonator and steel guitars are especially suited to this style of blues.

If you get more involved in slide guitar and practice the technique frequently, it would be a good idea to have the strings of your guitar raised off the neck more than they are for non-slide guitar. This can be done using something called an “extension nut” but it is not necessary at a basic or experimental level. But, since you’re probably at the basic level or just trying it out to see how it plays, it’s more important for you to listen to some sample slide guitar, hear how it sounds and then experiment with replicating that sound.

Listening to blues songs like Eric Clapton’s “Layla” and Elmore James’s “Dust My Broom” will give you an idea of the unique sound of slide guitar and demonstrate what you are trying to replicate. Once you know how it should sound, begin experimenting with the slide and guitar of your choice. Don’t worry if what you’re doing doesn’t sound exactly like what Elmore James is doing. One of the hardest parts of learning to play slide guitar is learning to properly mute unwanted strings. But experiment for a few hours and you’ll get the hang of controlling which strings sound and which don’t.

Frankly, hours of experimenting is what playing slide guitar as a beginner is all about. It takes time to become comfortable using the slide and controlling the sound it produces and this comfort can’t be taught in a blues guitar lesson. That being said, the above information about history, technique and even the material of the slides should help you as you begin playing slide guitar. It’s a technique with a rich history stretching back to the 1920s and the early days of Mississippi Delta Blues and it is from this rich history that you can learn how to play slide guitar.

The blues as a genre is possessed of a deep and varied history with many artists contributing their own style to the genre and changing it through their work. Despite this varied history, a number of great blues guitarists stand out as either individuals who heavily influenced the genre or individuals who captured the public’s imagination as performers. In this article, I wanted to share with you a few of the great blues guitar legends of our time.

A blues guitarist whose impact is still felt today, Robert Johnson belongs at the beginning of any article on great blues players. Born in 1911 and poisoned in 1938, Johnson was a publicly successful blues guitarist for only a few years before his death. In his short time performing, Johnson contributed a great deal to the Mississippi Delta Blues tradition and helped pioneer the slide guitar technique as used in blues guitar. His blues songs like “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” and “Crossroad Blues” were popular in their day and are considered standards in blues guitar today.

Playing blues songs in the tradition established by Johnson, B.B. King is a legendary blues guitarist whose crisp guitar style makes him an important icon for beginners just learning blues guitar. King has an extensive discography and is known for a number of songs but two that might stick out to fans are “The Thrill is Gone” and “Everyday I Have the Blues.” Unlike Johnson, King doesn’t represent or fit neatly into any specific blues tradition like Mississippi Delta Blues of Piedmont Blues; instead, King developed an individual style incorporating various blues traditions such as slide guitar. Overall, King is an example to beginning blues guitarists who could learn a lot from his crisp individual style and mastery.

Another standout individual in the blues genre, Eric Clapton cites bother Johnson and King as significant inspirations and influences in his own career as a blues guitarist. Clapton was a product of the British blues revolution of the 1960s when a number of British bands – including Clapton’s “The Yardbirds” – emerged playing American blues music. As a product of this British movement, Clapton can’t be categorized as part of any American blues traditions the way that Johnson can be. Instead, Clapton developed an individual style closer to blues-rock than the American blues of men like Johnson and T-Bone Walker. Even as someone with a very individual style, Clapton’s blues pedigree is evident in songs like “Layla” where Clapton makes heavy use of slide guitar techniques.

Inspired by Clapton as well as Otis Rush and Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan demands a place on any survey of great blues guitarists. His particular style is similar to Hendrix’s and combines a number of blues guitar styles including a heavy use of vibrato. Vaughan’s style is also noteworthy for including some elements of jazz guitar but it is his stage presence and the personality in his guitar style that single Vaughan out for praise. Beginning blues guitarists would do well to study songs like Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” or “Little Wing” in an attempt to both learn more about blues guitar and the specific stylistic choices that made Vaughan great.

These four guitarists do not constitute a top four list of blues guitar legends but merely represent four standout personalities in the history of blues guitar. Examining the work of each would benefit every student of blues guitar as they attempt to learn more about specific styles of play.

The guitar is inextricably linked to the development of blues music over the last 120 years. Since its beginning around 1890 and maturation 20 years later around 1910, the blues were characterized by powerful vocals accompanied by acoustic guitar. Guitar is the original accompaniment in blues and it dominated the music of the blues for the first decade of the genre’s development. Steadily, blues came to include accompaniment by pianos, harmonicas and even saxophones but the guitar still defined the sound of blues.

The guitar was influential in early blues songs but blues also exercised a certain power over the development of the guitar in America. New styles of playing the guitar were popularized through blues music with the development of both finger picking blues and slide guitar originating with blues guitarists.

Finger picking guitar was developed in the Southeastern United States as part of the Piedmont blues. This finger picking style is ultimately influenced by ragtime piano tunes and is characterized by the guitarist using his or her thumb on the bass string to produce a rhythm while his or her forefinger plays the treble strings to produce a melody. Piedmont blues guitarists like Blind Boy Fuller and Josh White popularized the finger picking style and influenced countless guitarists outside of blues including Paul Simon and Mark Knopfler.

From 1890 to 1940, acoustic guitar and the aforementioned acoustic guitar innovations defined the instrumental-ism of blues but the period following World War II changed blues music forever and did so using new types of guitars. Specifically, the post-World War II period in blues was characterized by the use of bass, double bass and electric guitars in a number of regional blues styles. Slide guitar and finger picking Piedmont blues continued to develop in this new era in blues guitar as did other pre-war blues styles but new electric styles of Chicago blues, Memphis blues and Texas blues defined how many Americans understood blues music.

Blues electric guitar and bass styles were pioneered and perfected by blues guitarists like John Lee Hooker and Stevie Ray Vaughn and the influence of American electric blues sparked a vibrant blues movement in England during the 1960s that included blues guitarists like Eric Clapton. The electric blues are also notable in guitar history for influencing the development of American rock ‘n’ roll. While recording for Sun Records in Memphis, much of Elvis Presley’s style was influenced by the work of the label’s blues guitarists including B.B. King.

Although acoustic and electric blues guitar both have a rich history as part of the blues genre, they are also notable for their influence on the development of modern music and especially their influence on the formative years of American rock ‘n’ roll. Styles like slide guitar and Piedmont blues finger picking that were pioneered in the early decades of the 20th century are still prominent in modern guitar. With its 120-year history, blues guitar is a vibrant genre of its own that offers something to every guitarist whether they play acoustic, electric or bass guitar and no matter what their primary genre of interest is.