Blues You Can Use (Blues You Can Use)
This great Blues Guitar Book is the first in a series of reveered guitar books. It's full of blues licks, phrases and solos that will have you playing the blues right away. The author takes care to not only show you how to play the licks, but also explains the how and why of each lick. John Ganapes explains which licks can be used during specific parts of a 12 bar blues. Blues You Can Use (Blues You Can Use) consistantly gets rave reviews from users on Amazon for a good reason. It truly is a guitar book (complete with Lesson CD) that will show you tricks you will immediately be able to use in your playing. Find more books at Amazon.com
Here are a few of amazon.com user reviews:
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
No more "Can't play the blues" blues!, October 4, 2005
First, it should be said that you need a basic understanding of the guitar and know some open chord forms to jump right into this series of books. With that limitation, I can say without a doubt that this is the easiest, best organized, and best presented introduction to electric blues that I have found. The tunes in the lessons start out fairly simple and gradually become more complex, as you progress through the book.
Most books just toss you into the "centre of the swimming pool" and tell you to "SWIM!" This series systematically progresses you through the lessons, introducing theory and more complex chords and technique only at the point that you should be ready for it. This, of course, assumes you use good judgement and not rush things. Take your time (as the book directs you to do) and learn each lesson thoroughly before going on to the next one. At times, it may feel like you are moving too slowly, but by all chances you are not.
If I could change one thing about the CD, it would have one more track for each song/lesson that did not have the lead track included. Either that or it should have the lead track panned over to one stereo channel and the backing on the other stereo channel, as many other instructional CDs do. However, this is NOT a show stopper.
Is this everything you need to know about blues guitar? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Is this everything you need to get started with electric blues guitar? If you know your "basics" then the answer is ABSOLUTELY YES! Personally, I would still recommend (regardless of whether you are working with an instructor or not)that you go through a good method book (Hal Leonard, Mel Bay, whatever one you like) as well as ear training, separate theory book, and sightreading. This is not a "one stop shopping" book. It is an EXCELLENT book to get you playing blues tunes FAST, but you will need to go a good bit beyond this book to sound like Clapton or Stevie Ray.
The bottom line is that I HIGHLY recommend this book for the person that likes to get to the meat of things quickly and not go the slower academic route. This book teaches you about Pentatonic and Blues scales, but does not really concentrate much on knowing the NOTE NAMES. This is also important, so don't rely strictly on learning the scale patterns and not knowing the notes. Your phrasing should be based around the scales, chord tones, AND target notes, if you want to sound like a pro. However, you don't need to understand all that just to get going. This book will provide what you need to get going!
New Blues players... THIS is your starting line! It is the best of its kind that I have found! Even if you are completely new to guitar, you should be playing your first blues song in a month or so. If you have been playing a little while, you will have the first song nailed in a week or so. Now you have no more reason to have the "Can't play the blues" blues...
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
Very solid learning tool, June 1, 2001
The whole problem with this type of book is the scope of the subject. How can you introduce the blues, or for that matter any genre of music, in one volume? The answer is that you can't. There is theory, there is practice routine, there is technique, there are idiosyncracies of musical notation, and there is the music itself (the particular music the book presents for you to learn). Any given book can only hope to touch on all of these.
But this book does a pretty good job. The theory introduced is pretty minimal, actually--you'd have to go to other sources for that--but that's understandable. The music that you get to learn is mostly pretty good. Not too hard to learn, but not exactly easy either (this book is by no means for a raw beginner), and it all sounds pretty cool.
I've been playing for about 3-1/2 years now. I got the book about three weeks ago, and I'm nearly half way through it. (I usually practice at least two hours a day.) I haven't come up against anything that I couldn't learn, given some patient practice. I'm finding snippets of music from the book working their way into my playing. That's the best possible sign that the book was worth the money.
More reviews