The Complete Guide to Playing Blues Guitar: Compilation (Learn How to Play Blues Guitar)

Im just starting out and have picked up a few books on the Blues by different authors. Joseph Alexander’s books, for me, are my favorite. They start off for the beginner but quickly bring in more complicated material which is a great motivator as you can see - and more importantly hear - your progress quickly. They are not easy though and do require a lot of practice but the work is worth it. This book is a combination of three of his other books and provides a lot of great material to advance your skill with! I am very glad I got this and his book Fingerstyle Blues Guitar!

This book is easy to follow. Contains great step by step examples to help guide you through the learning process. Nice having the backing tracks included to play along with and the recorded lessons to refer to. I am pleased with this book.

As a beginner learning to play Blues I was not sure about purchasing this book. But I did purchase it and my reservations were a waste of time and energy. The information provided was right on for me. The book is laid out in an easy to follow format. You could read it cover to cover or use it to improve in separate sections. No matter how you use it, you will find topics that you will learn or improve upon!

I had just finished an online Blues guitar course by David Isaacs on JamPlay.com, and was looking for some book which completely covers the basic of Blues guitar theory. The material explained in the books were thorough and concise, and it was exactly what I was looking for!

This series of books has helped not only my joy of playing blues, but has helped me break through barriers that were holding my playing back, it also recommends great songs to listen to to open up your blues repertoire.

Excellent practices, and complete breakdown. Audio files are great too!

Upon receiving this book I read it cover to cover, which is what I like to do with any music literature book. Having played other styles of guitar professionally, I have been interested in Blues Guitar. For the last three years I have studied numerous books and DVD courses on electric and acoustic blues guitar. What I like about this series of three books is how they get inside the music and the explanation of how to allow each note to express your feelings.There is a good deal of materiel presented here that I have not seen elsewhere. It has great value to anyone interested in playing Blues Guitar. It is especially useful for the electric guitar. I also play acoustic blues and especially like finger style for that. There is not much for the finger style player, but you will not find a better series for the electric guitar.Book 1 starts out by introducing you to various blues rhythms, embellishments and how to play them. Playing Blues Rhythm Guitar is important for many reasons. You should understand this essential part of the Blues even if you never play solos. And if you do play solos, the rhythm guitar will be so important to understand as to what you can play and where. Your ear is so important! Book 2 takes you inside out of playing blues solos. You will learn more about how to improvise, and modify what you may know to have a very different sound and feeling. Book 3 teaches you how to use different scales and other essential information for the soloist.The examples are given in the key of A. You should know enough about guitar to transpose to other keys. If examples were given in all keys you would end up with a 3000 page book! There is a great deal of “meat and potatoes”, as well as “desert”. By the time the student finishes this book he or she should have a greater understanding of Blues Guitar. I would estimate it should take the average student at least one year to complete all three books. It will be time well spent.

I had a guitar in high school, pre youtube but never really got into it because I already played saxophone and got terribly bored with the method books that taught me one note at a time and spent way too much time on how to read music (which I can do) and not enough time teaching me how to play music on the instrument at hand. This book is not like that. It will not waste your time teaching you to read music or how to hold your instrument you can find that on youtube and be strumming basic chord in about and hour. It starts out by giving you some chord shapes and then introduces the twelve bar blues. Then gives you some different chord shapes and more blues. Then some embellishments and more blues. As a competent musician with a new instrument this has enabled me to enjoy my guitar in the first week that I have owned it and is helping me toward my goal of be a competent blues artist on my guitar. It is nice for a musician new to guitar in that so far it has not thrown any curve balls every time it introduces a new chord it gives you the diagram for it ahead of time and there is an audio track for everything I have used so far. It may be the deep end of the pool for a beginner but I am getting results.

First off, this is three books in one and as such, it represents good value for money against buying them separately. The first book (Rythm Guitar) focuses mainly on 12 bar blues in different keys with a good helping of riffs and fills. These are the fundamental building blocks of blues and the author gets the learner to focus on rhythm and the placement of chords which means you start to get a "feel" for the music very early. It starts easy and gradually builds in difficulty.The second book (Melodic Phrasing) looks at soloing. It may be tempting to dive straight into this section but don't. Go through the basics in book 1 first as it underpins the second and third books. What I like about this book is that the author wants you to be able to build your own melodies rather than just memorise what others are doing. There are loads of books that will just show you dozens of licks but if you don't really understand how and why they work, you will never be able to improvise.In book 3 (Beyond Pentatonics) you are moving, well, beyond the classic pentatonic-based blues scales and chords. This is quite important if you want to really become a quality blues guitarist that is doing things beyond beginner/intermediate level. Pentatonics are great and you need to know how to use them, and for many it is enough to be good. There is a whole world beyond and the author gives insight as to where this could take you as a player.There are downloadable audio files for each exercise and examples that you can play along to. The book is overall is clear and well presented and although I could nit-pick about the occasional hard to read graphic, it really isn't a problem. To be clear, there are no quality issues with this book in my opinion. Both tab and sheet music are provided but there is no guidance on how to read either, however there are loads of free resources online on how to do both.All in all I think this is money well spent for the beginner, improver and intermediate player.

I have played the guitar for quite a while, fingerpicking and strumming mostly, but have never tried to learn it properly, so I didn't reach a very high standard of playing. After bilateral carpal tunnel operations a few years ago, my right hand has not recovered properly and I have permanently numb fingers, making fingerpicking pretty clumsy (actually not really possible...). I saw this book and decided to give it a go - I'm going to learn to play from scratch, but properly this time. I figure that a lot of these old blues players managed to overcome all sorts of terrible issues to play blues guitar, so all I have to do is find a way that matches what I can do now with these dodgy-digits.The book starts from the very basics and gives a good introduction to tab too, so it's perfect for what I need. It looks like it builds to quite a high standard, so this is going to be a long-term project for me - and it might even get some feeling back into the fingers (I hope).Highly recommended.

I'm a self taught guitarist and have played for 30+ years across a variety of styles in bands and solo. Recently I wanted to go back to basics and fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge as well and really master some elements of technique. This is a great book for doing that. While it's not for complete beginners (it assumes you can already hold the guitar and you know basic tablature, chord shapes and fretting) intermediate and above players won't learn much new from the first book, although the accessible intro it provides to theory will likely still be useful to many like myself who play primarily by ear and feel. However the second and third books on developing solos and melodic playing are full of great examples - this is a book that doesn't focus on mastering scales so much as mastering musicality and developing complimentary lead lines rather than showboating technical mastery. The best bit is that it helps get you out of a pentatonic rut common to a lot of blues and blues rock players by helping develop new licks and conjunctions. The audio examples are a helpful bonus and there are even a few backing tracks to practice with. A great way to learn blues guitar from more or less the very basics and most importantly it gives you a strong toolset to continue learning after you've finished working through it.

This 3 books in one on the subject of Blues guitar playing is the perfect book for myself. Although not a complete beginner to the guitar. I was looking for a detailed book with a start from scratch to a more advanced understanding of the subject without having to jump from book to book on separate aspects of the topic.This book covers exactly that, lots of Detailed information plus clear music notation in standard and Tab in a logical chord by chordapproach, best of all to be able listen to every one of the chords and examples by downloading. EXCELLENT

This is a fantastic book, it's well printed so all the tabs are clear and easy to read and the mp3 tracks are simple to download from the authors site.Working through the books one by one i.e. 1,2,3 is easy and allows a smooth learning curve, so beginning with the basic blues rhythm and feel and chords in book one then onto melodic phrasing in book two and finally beyond pentatonics in book three. The example tracks are very well produced, they are labelled in order and clear(easy to hear), the included backing tracks are great to play with and relax just jamming using what you've learned.My only regret is that I've only just found this brilliant book and didn't have it years ago, I highly recommend anyone interested in learning blues guitar to pick up a copy.