I will admit that I am guilty of not sharing the successes of my students nearly enough…<\/p>\n
But just the other day I got a message on the forum from Joe Abrams, about how he’d been lurking at a local blues jam for about a year… but hadn’t yet found the courage to give it a try for himself.<\/p>\n
After a little persuasion from a good friend, Joe finally started getting up and sitting in…<\/p>\n
After just a couple of weeks of playing at the weekly jam, he started getting compliments on his rhythm playing from the bass player…<\/p>\n
As he put it,<\/p>\n
“I was playing “little cords’ and doing ‘chicks’ on the 2 & 4. Everyone else no matter what the skill level, was playing bar cords.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He then went on to tell me,<\/p>\n
“Every week someone would ask me what I was doing on rhythm, and why I hardly moved my hand through the changes…<\/p>\n
A lot of the players at the blues jam play all the time at jams and in bands, but I feel that I know something that they don’t know because of your teaching.<\/p>\n
Also I’m now getting complements on my soloing, because I’m using a lot of major with a lot of 6th notes.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But I think the part that really struck me was this realization (and I hope you see what I’m getting at)<\/p>\n
“It’s not that I’m better than the other guys (far from it) but I sound different than anyone else.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I try to make this point often, you don’t have to be fast or flashy, you just have to know what you’re doing.<\/p>\n
You want to know when to stay lean and float in and out with little chords and punchy rhythms…<\/p>\n
You want to know how to add in a couple of “righter” notes when the chord change calls for it…<\/p>\n
And most importantly, you need to be like Joe and know that you’re doing the right thing… even when everyone else is doing it differently.<\/p>\n
Joe’s been playing every single week since January and loving it. I could not be more proud of him and I hope you’ll follow his example \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
And in case you were wondering, all the skills he talked about can be found in the Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a> course, and Joe is also an All Access Pass<\/a> holder.<\/p>\n
I hope to get out to the Phoenix area soon and see him play for myself, soon!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I will admit that I am guilty of not sharing the successes of my students nearly enough… But just the other day I got a message on the forum from Joe Abrams, about how he’d been lurking at a local blues jam for about a year… but hadn’t yet found the courage to give it […]<\/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\/7713"}],"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=7713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7714,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7713\/revisions\/7714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}