Course Overview
Demystify the Secrets of the Blues with Professional Online and DVD Blues Guitar Lessons
Learning to play the blues might seem daunting. You’re a lover of the blues, but you respect that these blues guitar players do some pretty amazing things, and there’s no way you could ever play the same way.
You are right about one thing, playing blues guitar takes skill, and playing them well takes skill with a ton of practice, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the potential to learn how to play blues guitar.
To succeed you need the right tools that include: good step-by-step blues guitar instruction, feedback on what you need to practice and a way to test out your new skills so you can build confidence in your blues guitar playing.
Here at LearningTheBlues.com we love blues guitar as well, in fact we’re hack blues players our selves and have used several different blues guitar lessons while learning. We’ve created this site to help you find the best way to learn blues guitar for you and share some free tips we find along the way.
Below is a ranking of the top blues guitar lessons courses available online. We’ve used the Learn & Master Blues guitar course, JamPlay online blues guitar lessons and also Guitar Tricks online blues guitar lessons.
Learn and Master Blues Spotlight
The Spotlight Blues course is a set of 7 discs (6 DVDS and 1 CD) with 8 hours of blues guitar instruction. To make the most of this course you will need some basic guitar skills such as knowing your open major and minor chords.
The course instructor, Steve Krenz (click here for his bio), is also the author and instructor of their world famous intro guitar program Learn and Master Guitar. He’s a great teacher, and makes you feel almost as if you’re taking one-on-one private lessons just with him.
I really enjoyed the way they formatted the lesson content. Each lesson has a teaching section and a workshop section. The teaching portion for the first few lessons is just Steve and keyboardist showing you some basics 12 bar blues progressions, chords and scales.
The workshop portion of the lessons is where Steve explains what you need to pracitce and master before you move onto the next section. In some later workshop section Steve is playing with a full band on screen and you can play along with them.
Something you simply can’t do without when learning blues guitar is backing tracks. Since so much is about the feel for blues guitar you need some good band tracks you can play along with in different keys to master the new skills.
The Learn and Master Blues Spotlight includes not only audio tracks you can play on your CD player but also videos you play along with as well.
Click here to listen to some backing track samples
Over all I found this course the most straight forward to learn from, each lesson built on the previous one and it’s the best all around blues guitar lesson course for beginners. It’s under $100 bucks and has a 60 day satisfaction guarantee.
Visit Learn and Master Blues Guitar Spotlight Now
JamPlay Online Blues Guitar Lessons
First off let me start by saying that while both these videos and Learn & Maters Blues Spotlight course are blues guitar lessons there’s a difference to how you get the content.
With Learn and Master you pop the blues guitar DVD in your home DVD player and away you go, while with online blues guitar lessons you do need to be online and in front of your computer. If you don’t mind watching videos online, then keep on reading.
The biggest pro to JamPlay is the variety of blues content they offer on their site. JamPlay is basically a paid membership website that offers you access to multiple different teachers and a huge catalog of video lessons. Blues lessons are just one part of what JamPlay offers.
The benefit you receive as a blues guitarist is you’re exposed to more then just one teachers style. So you can learn electric blues, acoustic blues, finger style and bottleneck slid blues. There’s more variety to what you can learn.
The down fall is the lessons aren’t as organized. With the Learn and Master course it’s very straight forward that you start with the first DVD and go from there. When you login to JamPlay you’re given a choice a several different teachers and lesson styles to go through. You can of course go through them all, but it can be over whelming for a complete beginner.
In my opinion JamPlay is better for an intermediate guitar player who’s been playing for a while and has most of the basics down. This way you may not need the primer on the basics of the blues and you just want to get into learning some licks and different styles.
The cost is both a pro and a con. You pay monthly for access to JamPlay’s lesson content. So for $19.95 a month you get unlimited 24 x 7 access. If you join and are a member for less then five months it’s cheaper then a DVD course, of course you may join and find there’s a ton of stuff you want to learn inside there and stick around for longer. The other pro is that you get instant access, you can start watching your first blues guitar lesson in about 5 Minutes.
Click the link below to watch a sample JamPlay beginner Blues Lesson.
Guitar Tricks Online Blues Guitar Lessons
What’s the deal? Two online lessons sites? Well there is a difference between JamPLay and Guitar Tricks both in price and lesson content. JamPlay has a larger catalog of online blues guitar lessons, but I beleive they are more geared towards the younger player.
If you’re an older guitarist, and not trying to be agest towards anyone here, you will probably enjoy the teachers at Guitar Tricks more so then JamPlay. The same goes for the Learn and Master Blues Spotlight.
The blues lessons at Guitar Tricks are divided up into two main sections: Blues style 1 and Blues style 2. It’s sort of the beginner blues guitar and intermediate sections.
They’ve done a great job of creating an easy to follow lesson plan, similar to the Learn and Master Blues spotlight, that builds on itself. You can safely start learning the blues from Guitar Tricks even if all you know are your basic open major and minor chords.
There are fewer blues guitar teachers to choose from at Guitar Tricks but I don’t view this as a down side. This makes it easier to start learning and stick to their lesson plan.
Guitar Tricks is $14.95 a month and like JamPlay has a ton more to offer then just blues lessons. Click the link below to watch the intro video on their website.