More Blues You Can Use
This comprehensive follow-up to the brilliant Blues You Can Use is designed to help players develop their lead guitar and rhythm techniques.
This set covers everything from pentatonic scales, chord substitutions, single-note tremolo, double-string bends, 6th and 9th chords, reverse bends, shuffle rhythms, boogie patterns, vibrato techniques, chord accents, voice leading, arpeggios, rakes, blues runs and more!
All of the examples are in standard notation and guitar tab, and the CD includes 23 full-band tracks.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Useful Companion to the original “Blues You Can Use”
If you’re a beginning/intermediate blues guitarist, going through this book and it’s easier companion “Blues You Can Use” is the quickest way to learn the instrument.
In many artists’ compilation CDs, you’ll see “Essential such and such”, well there are essential topics that need to be covered in blues guitar playing also. Both of these books do a good job covering the essentials of blues guitar.
If you spend a year working on both of these books, and you’ll be playing most styles with inpunity with the steady increase in speed gained here.Now compare that to spending few fruitless years with a guitar instructor.
Every song is written to illustrate specific structure and technique. As you work through the book you will be learning lots of useful information.
In my opinion this is the most economic way to master the essentials of blues guitar playing. Some people may not like the style of blues guitar presented in this book as it’s bit of blues/rock style mixed in, but to get the basics down I can’t recommend a better set of books.
5 Stars Blues you can use. New melodic ways through the blues scales
I found the lead breaks simplistic, easy and well composed. Good to start out on. For the intermediate to advanced player new ideals / knowledge is offered. The lessons increase in difficulty as you learn more about the use of technique and the scale relationships up the neck. Don’t be fooled by the simple. This book will reveal new ways around and through the blues. I’m an intermediate to advanced player and I have learned from these lessons. Plus I enjoyed it.
3 Stars Can’t Quite Recommend
This is a pretty good extension to John Ganapes first tutorial on the Blues, “Blues You Can Use”. The songs are interesting and, as does the first book in the series, it contains well thought-out instruction on playing the Blues. However, it has a serious drawback. There are no backing tracks for songs on CD. Also, since it does not provide the tempo (in beats per minute), one has to spend valuable practice time building one’s own backing tracks (unless you have your own band handy).
The book claims one can adjust the channel selection in order to hear only the rhythm guitar. I did not find this to work very well. These days, there are plenty of tutorials that include backing tracks, as part of the package. For this reason, I cannot quite recommend it.
Filed under: Blues Guitar Lessons