CONNECTING TO THE BLUES
Our coaches will help you to...
-Attain a deeper level of connection with the experience of making music, enhancing your ability to express your own genuine and unique musical spirit.
-Raise your awareness of blues, and musical aesthetics.
-Help you really listen, tune in, let loose and play with other players.
-Expand your technical ability and musical imagination.
Whatever your level of experience, we will take you to your next level. If you are a beginner, we will guide you to a level where you can competently and tastefully play blues on your own, or with an ensemble.
There is no “graduation.” Music and the blues is an unending lifelong adventure.
What will be covered…
-What makes music/how does music speak (Sound organized within time, inhabited with spirit)(Soulful riffs that groove)
-The blues scale and use. Common idiomatic expressive nuances applied through articulations/bends, slides, hammers and pull-offs.
-Basic vocabulary of blues licks and bass lines
-12 bar/8 bar Blues forms and variations, including lyric form.
-Turnarounds
-Time keeping, the essence of making music. Counting through the various forms. Body language, tapping your foot, connecting and moving your body.
-Holding down the bottom with the bass, creating a solid foundation, subtlety of the “Deep pocket.”
-Chords and chord inversions used in blues, both major and minor Blues.
-Alternate tunings
-Common and less common grooves and feels of the blues, with particular emphasis on the nuance of shuffle/swing. Appropriate guitar/bass “orchestration.” Inversions for the various feels. Doubling the bass line or main riff, playing counter rhythms. Strumming and picking tips. Introduction to supplemental practice material. Listening to prime examples of the most common feels.
-Flat-pick technique
-Basic to advanced finger style Blues
-Basic to advanced slide playing
-Maximizing bass tone through technique
-Tone. Tone and its relationship to the playing technique, its relationship to the instrument, and to the amplifier.
-Listening to get in tune
-Ear training with the blues scale/singing the blues scale
-Playing from your imagination/its relationship to listening and to the vocabulary you have built into your muscle memory. Randomness… welcome it, listen to it, follow it, build on it.
-Motivic development and what makes a distinctive melody.
-Effective practicing
-A recommended listening list
…We will as much as possible provide context based on examples from legendary blues players.
… We don’t expect that you will necessarily get all of this in one visit, but you can come back!
