Creative Approaches for Crafting Engaging Blues Solos

Shot on location at Joe Robinson's Nashville studio, Expressive Blues Soloing is focused on a series of concepts and approaches designed to help you build your own original and more expressive blues solos.

Learning to craft original and expressive solos is a milestone marker for every blues guitar player. When starting out, we tend to fall back on the same old licks and scale shapes moves, which leaves us feeling uninspired and discouraged. Expressive Blues Soloing is designed to take you to the next level by passing on step-by-step approaches for crafting expressive, original solos from the licks and scales shapes you already know.

”I've designed this course to take you step-by-step through six essential blues soloing workouts. These will fast track your progress through the concepts and approaches you'll need to build your own, more expressive blues solos. You'll play your way through the course right along with me - just like we would if we were working on a lesson together in person!”

Joe organized the course into six lesson sets. Each set begins with a skill workout where you'll focus on a new technique or concept, and then Joe shows you how to put your new skills to work in a blues solo study to help you better understand how to apply the tools in your own solos.

”In the first set, we'll start out with what I believe to be the foundation of pulling a good tone out of your guitar - vibrato and bending. This is where our signature 'touch' comes from as guitar players.

Up next, we'll look at some melodic soloing ideas over a minor blues progression using double stops. This is a very useful and musical way to start breaking out of the pentatonic box.

In the third study set, we'll look at building on a motif - which is a technique many of the great jazz and blues musicians use to great effect. Taking a simple 4 or 5 note phrase and turning it into a real statement through repetition.

Our fourth study will cover fingerpicking blues techniques - using the thumb to play quarter notes on the open E and A strings, while the fingers play some simple phrases.

Study set five takes us to the use of Chromaticism - making use of more than just the 5 notes of the Pentatonic Scale or the 8 notes of the diatonic scale. We have some really nice colorful and musical tones to add to these sounds, and we'll discuss the possibilities we can explore over a dominant 7th chord.

And in our final set, we'll work on playing over a Jazz-Blues chord progression. A Jazz-Blues progression features a few additional twists and turns to a standard 12 bar blues pattern and knowing how to navigate these can be a wonderful addition to our blues improvising skillset.”

All of the performances are tabbed and notated and you'll be able to sync the tab and notation to the video using TrueFire's learning tools. All of the backing tracks are included and you can loop or slow down any of the videos so you can work with the lessons at your own pace.

Are you ready to get started? Grab your guitar, join me right here in my home studio, and let's take our blues soloing to a more expressive level…

Joe 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 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 included to work with on your own as well.

Grab your guitar and let's dig in with Joe Robinson!

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