If you've always wanted to learn how to play electric blues guitar - or even started once or twice in the past only to put it down in frustration - this series of beginner blues guitar lessons is likely the perfect approach for you. Blues Guitar for Beginners is a jump-start method designed to get you up and strumming quickly without having to work through tedious theory, scales and exercises. In fact, you'll be playing your first batch of cool blues moves in your very first week of working with the course.

Video Introduction

Click below for a sample video from the course.

About the Lesson Plan

Blues Guitar for Beginners is tailored specifically for adults who don't have the time or desire for formal training. To get you on the fast track, we've deliberately steered clear of music theory, reading notation, exercises and scales (there’s plenty of time for all that good stuff later). Instead, you'll dig in immediately learning how to play blues chords, strums, keeping time and build a vocabulary of bluesy licks.

Longtime TrueFire instructor and blues maven David Hamburger is your extremely capable guide to blues guitar. Hamburger has appeared at Merle Fest and countless other festivals and has performed with Joan Baez, Duke Robillard, and many others. David is a contributing editor to Acoustic Guitar, author of a dozen books, including the award-winning “Beginning Blues Guitar” and has authored many TrueFire courses.

Hamburger starts from scratch, teaching you how to tune, how to hold the pick and how to play your first bluesy notes. David explains every step and breaks each example down so you know exactly what to play and how to play it. He shows you how to strum with downstrokes and upstrokes, how to pick in time and how to get your chords to sound clean, while teaching you a variety of chord progressions and blues-based single-note riffs. On-screen chord diagrams and beat counters help you to stay on track, and jam tracks for each lesson make practicing fun – just play along with David and the practice rhythm tracks. By the end of the course you’ll be learn how to play rhythm and lead blues guitar parts for the Chicago shuffle, Texas shuffle, eight-bar blues, shuffle boogie and even a little 50s R&B.