Deep Blues

Blues forms, feels and progressions provide the soloing guitarist with an ideal foundation for creative expression, story telling and triggering an emotional connection with the audience.

Taking advantage of the wide open harmonic qualities of the blues, you can evoke virtually any emotional reaction from the listener — sad and blue, relaxed and pensive, upbeat and joyful — and everything in between.

“Monster” Mike Welch’s Deep Blues course reveals 12 creative approaches and expressive techniques that you can put to use right away to tell your stories and establish a deeper connection with your audience.

”We’ll look at ways to get more color from the blues box, using the melody as sign posts for soloing, using vocal-like expressions, creating surprise in your lines, bending, vibrato, harmonica inspired phrasing, emulating slide guitar, and much more.

We’ll play our way through this course working with jam tracks, in a variety of keys and feels to give each of these approaches musical context. Along the way, I’ll share some of my favorite influences from many legends of the blues including BB King, Otis Rush, Little Milton, Little Walter, Robert Nighthawk and many others.”

With over 25 years of touring and recording under his belt “Monster” Mike Welch has released six albums under his own name. He’s racked up multiple Blues Music Award nominations with Sugar Ray and the Bluetones and four Blues Music Awards with Mike Ledbetter. Mike also won a Blues Music Award, a Boston Music Award for Best Blues Act, and is an inductee of the Rhode Island Music Hall Of Fame. We’re thrilled to welcome Mike to the family with his first TrueFire course, Deep Blues.

Mike will explain and demonstrate the key concepts and approaches for 123 creative approaches and techniques: Getting More Color from the Blues Box, The Melody as Sign Posts for Soloing, More Vocal Like Expressions, Creating Surprise in Your Lines, The Freedom & Personality of Bending, Playing Low String Phrases, Harmonica Phrasing & Pre-bends, Vibrato Approaches, Approximating Slide Articulation, Chord Colors for a Slow Blues, Rhythm Approaches for Shuffles, and Expressing Emotion in Your Playing.

You’ll get standard notation and tabs for all of the performance studies. Plus, you’ll be able to use TrueFire’s learning tools 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 of the backing tracks are also included to work with on your own.

Grab your guitar, and let’s dig deep with “Monster” Mike Welch!