Friday, March 4, 2011

Blues Guitar Lesson Course Reviews - Jim Bruce

Do you want to progress beyond playing the same old chord shapes on your acoustic guitar, and learn how to play the blues guitar techniques like picking and slide guitar styles? Or maybe you've got some experience with finger style guitar techniques, but would like to learn how to pick the blues?

The complete Acoustic Blues Guitar course features many very detailed video lessons which includes accurate  guitar tab, that will teach you how you can master finger picking blues guitar, ragtime blues and slide guitar, just like the blues legends such as Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, and Mississippi John Hurt.

Every video lesson in the package shows how you can perform these techniques by featuring a whole song song in a chosen blues style,teaching it section by section, then showing how to put those parts together.

Course Instructor

Jim Bruce is a well established and admired teacher in the blues styles, and he's produced several CDs up to press. He also spends a fair amount of time playing this style of guitar music on the streets and bars of France, and so he's gathered three decades of useful experience in playing blues on guitar. He gives us the benefit this experience throughout the lessons - take one example, when we start the lesson for 'Key To The Highway', Jim teaches a 'regular' and 'street' version of this piece, with this 'street' version is used more for a live performance.  This is a wonderful way to learn how to play blues guitar.

Lesson Package Contents - What You Are Buying

The complete package features of thirty six high quality WMV or MOV video files burned onto data-disks, along with files in PDF format of full tablature to accompany the lessons. Each of the videos features a full comprehensive lesson on learning one particular blues/ragtime piece, for example 'Key To The Highway' (Big Bill Broonzy), or 'Crossroads' (Robert Johnson). All you have to do is insert the disk into your computer, select a lesson and play it like an ordinary video.

Also, straight after the payment process,  an instant download link is provided, so that you can get working a lesson or two while waiting for your disks to be delivered.

Description Of The Course - What's in the Lessons Package?

Each individual lesson starts with Jim playing the complete tune, at normal tempo. This is super to see, even though it can seem a tad unsettling, when you realize you will be learning to play the same song! Then the lesson commences, as Jim breaks the song right down into little, accessible parts that you can work on during a practice session. Jim also slows it right down, making it simple to understand and follow.

During the instructional sections of the video, the guitar tab and chords are shown on the screen, which makes it quite simple to understand.

Another thing that can be difficult when starting to play the blues, is matching the picking movements of the right hand,with playing chords and fretting strings with the left. In each of the lesson videos, Jim shows close up shots of both the right hand picking technique and the left hand chord positions, and in this way you can see more easily what's happening. Each of the different sections of the song are then put together, so you can rapidly progress towards the complete performance.

For some of these videos (e.g. Crossroads), Jim also goes over learning to play bottleneck or slide blues guitar, which is the basis of a classic 'blues' genre. The video parts on this are clear, including good close up shots, and Jim gives many effective pieces of advice on how best to use the slide, for example, on how to damp down the strings with your bottle neck hand, which is crucial if you want to get a nice guitar sound.