Southern Roots

American roots music was born in the South and worked its way up the Mississippi River to Chicago, New York, and eventually even across the pond to England. The electric guitar was the vehicle that changed the face of 20th-century music forever.

Scott Sharrard’s Southern Roots examines the key creative approaches and requisite techniques that guitarists need to develop their own voice when playing any genre of American roots music.

Billboard Magazine hails him as, “One of the best guitarists in the country. Greg Allman agrees, “I know all about guitar players — I’ve seen the very best and Scott Sharrard is the perfect guitarist for my band. He understands that you don’t need to play just for the sake of playing; He never steps on the vocals, leaves plenty of room for everyone else to do their thing, but when it’s time to solo… Scott delivers, boy!”

We’re thrilled to welcome Scott to the family with his first TrueFire course, Southern Roots! You will likewise be thrilled as you play your way through this eye and ear-opening curriculum that Scott presents in this highly engaging course.

”I've been privileged to record, perform and collaborate with so many legendary blues, rock, soul, jazz, and country artists throughout my career. Their influence helped shape my own voice on the guitar. In this course, we're going to explore what I consider to be the essentials for playing any genre of American roots music.”

Scott organized the course into four sections. In the first, he covers a few of his core blues influences and demonstrates how he incorporates them into his rhythm playing and solos. The second section focuses on creative approaches for improvisation.

In the third section, you’ll work on slide guitar and then finally, you'll dig into some critical technical approaches in the fourth section like bends, vibrato, chord comping, right-hand approaches, shape-based improvisation, and blues scale analysis.

Throughout the course, Scott presents demonstrations for all of the key concepts and techniques, and then you’ll play through 12 performance studies to illustrate those approaches in context.

Scott will explain and demonstrate all of the key concepts and approaches along the way. You’ll get standard notation and tabs for all of the key demonstrations and performance studies. Plus, you’ll be able to use TrueFire’s learning tool to sync the tab and notation to the video lesson. You can also loop or slow down the videos so that you can work with the lessons at your own pace. All the backing tracks are included to work with on your own as well.

Grab your guitar and let’s play some Southern Roots with Scott Sharrard!