{"id":4231,"date":"2012-09-06T00:00:53","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T05:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/?p=4231"},"modified":"2015-04-02T01:08:47","modified_gmt":"2015-04-02T08:08:47","slug":"painting-your-picture-with-the-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/painting-your-picture-with-the-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"Painting Your Picture With The Blues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever noticed how you can take the same blues song and do it a bunch of different ways?<\/p>\n<p>Or that you can take a riff from one song, and use the lyrics from another song, and it will still work out just fine?<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t believe me? Check out this version of &#8220;Crossroads&#8221;<\/p>\n<div class=\"video-plugin-new youtube\" style=\"max-width:100%; width:560px; height:auto; padding-top:0; padding-bottom:0; margin:0 auto;margin:0 auto; border: 0px solid #fff;margin-bottom: 20px;\"><div style=\"width:560px;height:0;  padding-bottom: 56.25%; padding-top:0;\"><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-twOjwBORwg?wmode=opaque&showinfo=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;vq=&amp;rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div><\/div>\n<p>Not exactly what Robert Johnson originally played&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"video-plugin-new youtube\" style=\"max-width:100%; width:560px; height:auto; padding-top:0; padding-bottom:0; margin:0 auto;margin:0 auto; border: 0px solid #fff;margin-bottom: 20px;\"><div style=\"width:560px;height:0;  padding-bottom: 56.25%; padding-top:0;\"><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qD2jXjV9Z8A?wmode=opaque&showinfo=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;vq=&amp;rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div><\/div>\n<p>It&#8217;s one of my favorite things about the blues. It&#8217;s as if the blues is made of all these different puzzle pieces. But you get to choose what picture you make from the different pieces.<\/p>\n<p>And as you may have noticed, no other style of music does it quite the same way blues music does. Which you might say is why we love this music so much.<\/p>\n<p>So do you think that you should learn to play the blues in the same manner that you learn to play classical music?<\/p>\n<p>Most people would say no, they are clearly different.<\/p>\n<p>But what about learning country music in the same way that you learn blues? Or jazz in the same way you learn blues? Or heavy metal in the same way you learn blues?<\/p>\n<p>The reality is that every style of music has its own unique characteristics that need to be presented in a slightly different way.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m fortunate that I&#8217;ve played in country, jazz, classical, flamenco, heavy metal, pop, classic rock, disco, funk, and blues bands in my career.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;ve also had the good fortune to teach students in every one of those styles. And I can assure you that they are all unique.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, the basic technique is fundamentally the same. How you hold your guitar and the proper finger placement generally doesn&#8217;t change too much (although for classical it changes more than many others.)<\/p>\n<p>But you probably learned your basic techniques years ago if you are currently online looking for ways to improve your blues playing.<\/p>\n<p>So why would you try to learn blues from a heavy metal player, or from a funk player?<\/p>\n<p>And if your goal is to someday play in a band, or at least play with a buddy or your family members, wouldn&#8217;t you want to make sure you were learning from someone who actually has some experience (preferably a LOT of experience) with group playing situations?<\/p>\n<p>I hear more and more these days from my students and newsletter subscribers about the problems they are having trying to learn from all the &#8220;free&#8221; material out there. Yes, YouTube is great for some things, but probably 90% of the guitar lessons students point me to are so out of context that they make little to no sense by themselves and an alarming number of them teach techniques and ideas that can do far more harm than good.<\/p>\n<p>Always keep this in mind as you are cruising YouTube looking for something to spend 15 minutes playing with&#8230; instead take the 15 minutes and practice something that you sort of know, but haven&#8217;t yet mastered.<\/p>\n<p>In the long run you&#8217;ll become a better guitar player continuing to improve on things that you have trouble with than looking for something easy that you can play with little effort.<\/p>\n<p>And have a goal in mind. If your goal is to improve your repertoire and learn more songs &#8211; spend the money on a professional transcription of the song. User generated TABs are almost always wrong and it will just end up frustrating you when you can&#8217;t figure out why what you are playing sounds nothing like the recording (I know this from years of experience!)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve made it my mission over the past 25+ years to teach guitar in a logical and enjoyable way. I, like many guitar teachers, give out free videos and content. Some of it is really very good, but there&#8217;s no denying the fact that if you really want to learn and improve by leaps and bounds, you are going to have to commit to a program that is known to work.<\/p>\n<p>For beginners I have <a href=\"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/get-beginning-blues-guitar\">Beginning Blues Guitar<\/a>, or if you&#8217;re more of a strummer try <a href=\"http:\/\/strummingmastery.com\">Strumming And Rhythm Mastery<\/a>. For most people, the original <a href=\"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/get-blues-guitar-unleashed\">Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a> course is still their best option&#8230; unless you play acoustic and then you might prefer <a href=\"http:\/\/acousticbluesguitarunleashed.com\">Acoustic Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever noticed how you can take the same blues song and do it a bunch of different ways? Or that you can take a riff from one song, and use the lyrics from another song, and it will still work out just fine? Don&#8217;t believe me? Check out this version of &#8220;Crossroads&#8221; Not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4231"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4231"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6570,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4231\/revisions\/6570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}