Daniele Bazzani: Fingerstyle Blues Guitar – ENG

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Daniele Bazzani: Fingerstyle Blues Guitar – English language and TABS

These blues studies were written for some of my students with the purpose to give them a good melody to play, even in a blues context, as something to have fun with while learning, at least I hope so. But there’s more than just that. Everything is written in standard tuning to be not too difficult (this does not necessarily mean “easy”), I kept the fingerings as easy as they could be, and to be playable even at slow speed. Increasing speed will give a completely different approach to each tune, so that a well- trained player can find satisfaction too. But there’s more than just that. Old country-blues players used to have a favourite key to play in, when I listen to old recordings I notice that a big part of the overall sound – because of the guitar’ structure – is given by the key used in the tune; I applied this concept to studies in several keys, using the different colours and fingerings belonging to each one of those. At the beginning of the ‘900, The Blues was a music rich of influences, so we could find a dance tune as a slow ballad, not just with 7th chords but with progressions coming from the european tradition, I tried to incorporate more elements than just three chords and a pentatonic blues scale (which sometimes is enough to play great music!). But there’s more than just that. I also tried to use as many chord shapes as I could, to build melodic lines, so to make easier for the student to play everything. I used alternate and straight bass and as many “tricks” I could: open strings against fingered notes, slides, hammer-ons and pull-offs. But there’s more than just that. The level of the method is intermediate but, as I wrote, advanced players might have fun trying some studies at a higher speed. You will even find, at the end of the book, some more challenging studies that I wrote using the same criteria, different keys to give different moods. Players coming from different styles and wanting to know something about The Blues might find an overlook on the style and interesting elements to use in different keys.

I’m not trying to teach how to be Son House or Skip James, I used my blues knowledge and my love for this music to write some tunes. I hope I made a good job, I’ve been using these material for quite some time now with good results, these videolessons are to share all of this with everyone who’s interested, students and teachers.

Thank you for paying attention.

Daniele Bazzani