Bar Room Blues

Bar Room Blues: “Bring It On Home To Me”

Bar Room Blues is an exclusive series of video guitar lessons by Steve “Red” Lasner covering classic blues songs from historically great guitarists like B.B. King, T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy, and many others. A new lesson will be released each week, so be sure to subscribe and check back often! Also, if you want more guitar lessons like these, be sure to check out Red’s Guitar Sherpa class.

“Bring It On Home to Me” is a 1962 soul song written and recorded by R&B singer-songwriter Sam Cooke. The song, about infidelity, was a hit for Cooke and has become a pop standard covered by numerous artists of different genres. It is one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. Cooke’s recorded version has Lou Rawls singing responses as an uncredited background singer.

This song is considered by many historians of soul music to be the founding, or at least definitive soul song, as it provides the formula that is still popular today. Cooke’s live version of this song that he performed in Miami, from the album Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, can be seen as his personal vision of what soul music should be, owing to the texture and emotion conveyed through his vocals that night, and that were probably standard in Cooke’s near-nightly shows in primarily black clubs.

Read on for the full guitar lesson on how to play this classic blues song including video, tab, and jam tracks…

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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October 18th 2011

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #19 Hank Mobley II

50 Jazz Blues Licks is an exclusive series of video guitar lessons by David Hamburger covering the jazz blues styles of historically great guitarists like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Joe Pass, and many others. A new lick will be released each week, so be sure to subscribe and check back often!

Back to Hank Mobley this week, and another lick that works over a 24-bar blues with a straight-eighth feel. With plenty of time on each chord of the turnaround, this lick takes the idea of the bebop dominant 7th scale to its logical conclusion, descending for a full-octave over the V chord and partway into the IV before climbing back up the scale and landing on some blues moves at the return to the I. It’s as good a metaphor as any for Mobley’s general outlook: nimble execution of the changes, shot through with blues sensibilities, and all of it cleverly folded into some kind of twist or another on the usual forms and progressions. But then, what did you expect of someone who started his recording career with Art Blakey and Horace Silver, made albums with the likes of Lee Morgan and Wynton Kelly, and released LPs with titles like “No Room For Squares” and “A Caddy For Daddy”? While you won’t stumble across Mobley on anything as overtly downhome as an organ combo record, for a guy brainy enough to fill in for Coltrane in the Miles Davis quintet in 1961, he’s one soulful individual.

Read on for the full guitar lesson…

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Bar Room Blues

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October 12th 2011

Bar Room Blues: “Born Under a Bad Sign”

“Born Under a Bad Sign” is a song written by Booker T. Jones and William Bell originally recorded by Albert King as the title track for the album Born Under a Bad Sign released in 1967. Several cover versions of the song exist, most notably by Chicago blues band Paul Butterfield Blues Band, British rock group Cream, Paul Rodgers, American rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix.

The style of “Born Under a Bad Sign” is hallmark of Albert King in the late 60s. The lead guitar is bright, nasal and cutting, partly because of Albert King’s choice of a custom Gibson guitar with neck pickup selected. The looping bass line is composed of a C# pentatonic or blues scale while the piano and horn accompaniment remains major in its tonality. The unique mix of otherwise minor and major modes give the song a bright but harrowing sound.

The wide assortment of cover versions demonstrates Albert King’s ability to influence not only blues guitar, but also rock guitar. It is notable that Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “Born Under a Bad Sign” is essentially an extended guitar solo that explores King’s unique phrasing.

Read on for the full guitar lesson on how to play this classic blues song including video, tab, and jam tracks…

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50 Jazz Blues Licks

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October 11th 2011

50 Jazz Blues Licks: #18 Dexter Gordon

Our lick this week comes, for the second time, from an idea of Dexter Gordon’s on his tune “The Panther,” the title track from his first album of the 1970s. Miles Davis had just thrown down the electric gauntlet with the “Bitches Brew” album, released three months before Gordon recorded “The Panther,” and the whole fusion 70s was about to unfold in a blur of odd meters, 16th notes, funk rhythms and bleak times for those musicians who remained on a more straightahead path. But here’s Gordon burning through three standards and three originals with no less than our old pal Tommy Flanagan on piano and, for extra Jazz-Blues credit, the album closes with Lou Donaldson’s tune “Blues Walk.” (Spend enough time in any one corner of the world and all of the same people start walking through the door, it seems.) And as funk and fusion blew through the decade, scooping up the Freddie Hubbards and Herbie Hancocks of the world, Gordon, who came of age a short generation earlier, just kept making badass small-group jazz records like this one, nearly all the way up until his demise in 1990.

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Night Classes

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October 6th 2011

Night Class: Intermediate Blues Rock Solos – Week 5: Smiling Phrases

Night Classes are ten-week TrueFire guitar lesson plans that build on basic concepts and techniques from TrueFire courses. Intermediate Blues Rock Solos uses guitar lessons from the courses of Jeff Scheetz and Joe Deloro to offer a bevy of tips and tricks to take your blues rock solos to the next level.

Welcome to week five of TrueFire’s Intermediate Blues Rock Solos Lesson Plan featuring a segment from Jeff Scheetz’ course Blues Rock Secret Sauce.

Blues is a great style to work on phrasing techniques due to the amount of space and the slower tempos it provides, allowing the opportunity to focus on phrasing nuances. Every time we play, we’re applying phrasing whether we are conscious of it or not. This week’s lesson focuses on phrasing and its variations.

The chord progression is divided into two-measure sections. We play three sections with one bar of Dm7–Am7 followed by a bar of Gm7. The Gm7 chord is approached from above by a G#m7 chord. After the first three sections, we play two, two-measure sections of F–Bb. Jeff also works with sequences that start on different slots in a measure, sometimes using the exact same riff shifted a sixteenth of a beat over.

Read on for the full guitar lesson…

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