Groove3 Fingerstyle Blues Guitar TUTORiAL

Ready to expand your blues fingerstyle skills? In this eight-lesson video course, you'll learn several great-sounding fingerpicking arrangements of well-known songs, such as "St. James Infirmary," "Beale Street Blues," "St. Louis Blues," and more. In each lesson, you'll gain valuable skills like thumb-finger right-hand independence, chord inversions, chromatic passing tones/chords, 6ths riffs, among others. By the time you're through with the course, you'll not only have several pieces added to your repertoire, but you'll have sharpen you fingerpicking skills in general. These videos are designed for the late beginner-early intermediate player looking to improve their fingerstyle skills and learn some great tunes in the process.

The course begins with several lessons from acoustic guitar wiz Gabe Andrews, the first of which is "St. James Infirmary." Gabe shares a fairly bare-bones arrangement of this piece in D minor to get you started, which is comprised of only a steady bass and melody. Then it's on to "Beale Street Blues," which expands upon the bass/melody approach by adding more movement in both voices.

Next, Gabe presents two different approaches to comping through a 12-bar blues in E minor. In Part 1, you'll see how to combine a walking bass line with chords above, which makes for an incredibly full-sounding accompaniment behind a singer or instrumentalist. In Part 2, he demonstrates how to use various chord inversions atop a constant bass to propel the momentum and add variation.

"St. Louis Blues" follows, and again Gabe presents two different arrangements, each focusing on a different concept. For the first arrangement in A minor, you'll learn how to keep a constant bass rhythmic pattern going while keeping an independent melody going above. The second arrangement, which is the parallel A major, explores the use of chromatic passing tones and colorful chords. The course wraps up with two more pieces: "Miss Delta" in the key of E major (by Mary Flower) and "I Know You Rider" (by Jorma Kaukonen) in A major, each of which demonstrate various techniques like contrapuntal-style independence, riffs in 6ths, and more.

Altogether, these pieces will not only help pad your blues fingerstyle repertoire, but they'll also broaden your skillset and teach useful concepts that can be applied in other arrangements and genres. Dive in!

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