Blues by the Bar: Cool Riffs That Sound Great over Each Portion of the Blues Progression
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(Guitar Educational). If you're a guitarist who's learned the pentatonic scale up and down the neck but still asks, "During a solo, how do I know what to play and when to play it?", then this book is for you. Its goal is to give you a variety of great blues licks that you can put together bar by bar to create a complete blues solo. Covers: the 12-bar blues progression, cool riffs, complete solos and more. The included audio features "Music Minus Me" tracks that let you play along as the featured soloist. The price of this book includes a unique code that provides access to audio tracks online, for download or streaming. The tracks include PLAYBACK+, a multi-functional audio player that allows you to slow down audio without changing pitch, set loop points, change keys, and pan left or right available exclusively from Hal Leonard. Read more
Publisher : Cherry Lane Music
Publication date : June 1, 2002
Edition : PAP/COM
Language : English
Print length : 32 pages
ISBN-10 : 1575604795
ISBN-13 : 94
Dimensions : 9 x 0.09 x 12 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,717,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #3,268 in Guitar Songbooks #7,151 in Music Instruction & Study (Books)
#3,268 in Guitar Songbooks:
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Top Amazon Reviews
Format: Paperback
I've been playing guitar off and on for over 30 years. My playing reached an intermediate level that I just seemed to get stuck at. From what I've read, this is very common. I learned the pentatonic scales up and down the fretboard and could put together a resonably cohesive blues solo. However, I found that I got stuck using the same licks and riffs over and over and over again with slight variations. My solos all sound the same at some level. This book is helping me break out of that rut. There are ideas presented in these riffs that would never have occured to me. Switching from the minor to pentatonic scale mid solo...huh, sounds pretty cool! Some of these ideas I've heard before, and now I can learn how to play them. I'll listen to a phrase and think "oh, that's pretty cool", and not long after, I've learned how to play it! I like that each phrase is presented in 2 measures. This makes them easily digestable and you can really dig into the subtle nuances of the lick presented. Too many people get hung up on speed and number of notes. Some of these licks present simple ideas with great subtle touches in phrasing and note bending. Others are more challenging with their speed. I've been working on the first 10 examples for about a week. It's a lot of fun and already I can see where I can take some of these ideas and incorporate them into my soloing. I can also take my existing bag of tricks and enhance what I've learned to make it "more my own". I agree with other reviews that this book is for an intermediate player, or maybe and advanceded beginner. You need to have some dexterity on the fretboard along with some strength in your fingers for bending. You'll also need to be able to do alternate picking and have some reasonable speed. Technique is not discussed in this book at all, because technique is not what this book is about. And that's what I like most about this book - I can learn and analyze cool sounding phrases without dealing the obstacle of speed technique. That's a separate task :-). I'm also finding it useful for tweaking my guitar tone, which is something I never really fine tuned. I'm learning what minor tweaks of tone controls and pickup selection can do to my sound and make it more expressive trying to match the tone on the CD.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2012 by Amazon Customer
Format: Paperback
Chris Hunt is a New York City-based guitarist, composer, and producer with a long list of top-flight credits and a solid educational background (Berklee School of Music). The concept of the book is fresh and well-grounded in the notion of the blues as an improvisational art. The author has broken a twelve-bar slow blues into six two-bar segments and provided a variety of examples of what you might do in each segment. If you study and absorb all of the examples, it will fill you with ideas for each part, and you will find yourself synthesizing new ideas from the fabric of old ideas. That's what improvisation is all about. It is also quite a technical workout, which is bound to give you more freedom of expression. There has apparently been some effort to keep the first example in each group relatively simple. However, the complexity curve rises steeply after that, which is why this is not a book for beginners. There are plenty of sixteenth notes throughout, and the bending is subtle. The phrasing is surprisingly good, which clearly shows that the author has absorbed the styles of the masters. Contrary to what is said in the negative review, the notation is standard notes plus tab, so there is plenty of information to work with. However, it would have been better if there was more, because there are some things that tab and standard notation can not portray. In example 3, for instance, a rake is indicated by grace-note "x"s on the pitches G and A, but the tab below it shows more accurately that they are on strings 5 and 4. You can figure out which one is correct because it can't possibly be "G and A," but it would be better if both types of notation agreed, so why not place the x's on the appropriate open-string notes in standard notation? Also, this is a point where performance notes would help. Exactly how and where do you mute the strings, and what should you watch out for (such as unintentional harmonics)? By the way, the rake is actually not on the third beat of the first measure, as shown, but on the second beat of the second measure, which indicates some sloppiness in editing. The same comments might be made about the rake-and-slide on the fourth beat of the second measure. Do you rake three open strings (5,4,3) that are muted and then drag your finger (which finger?) down the strings? This doesn't work. Not even close. It's pretty clear to me how he executed the rake-and-slide, but it should be spelled out, with performance notes added where needed. Perhaps the author was thinking, "Everybody knows how to do this," but he owes it to the audience to be as complete and true and accurate as possible. By the way, this is one of the most irritating things about modern electric guitar notation. It goes almost all the way, but pulls back and leaves you hanging just when it's about to finish the job. When you watch a video, it turns out to be simple, after all. Or not. But at least the notation should be complete and accurate. Authors owe that to the readers at minimum. The guitar used in the recording sounds good, so it would have been nice if there had been some equipment notes, which is pretty standard in magazines these days (see "Guitar Techniques"). Books haven't quite caught up, for some strange reason. It would have been helpful if Hunt had added a note to each example that said something like, "In the style of," and gave a discography. There's a lot of unused space on the pages, so it would have been easy. The blues scale breakdown at the beginning of the book includes left-hand fingering, but left-hand fingering is absent where it really counts: in the examples. If Hunt wanted to score a classic, he might have corrected all those faults, which are not unique to this book, but found in most guitar books. He might also have explained how to release or kill a bent note properly. There isn't a single source anywhere on the Web or in print, as far as I know, that does this, and yet it is obvious that ending a bend is a critical technique. Since there's more than one way to do it and a bunch of ways to do it wrong, it really demands some explanation. These faults make Hunt's book no worse than hundreds of others, and the concept and the examples he uses to flesh it out are way above average, so the book is a worthwhile investment. It could have been better if the author had shown more consideration for the audience, which is why I deducted one star. I recommend the book without hesitation.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2010 by Big Wave Dave
Format: Paperback
I've got to hand it to Chris Hunt. He knows how to make a buck in the music business by putting out compelling product. In this book you have a step by step or bar by bar approach to teaching slow 12 bar blues. The caveat being the licks are cherry picked and sound as tho they were gleaned from Robben Ford's blues vocabulary. I ordered this on a lark half thinking it would be mediocre to horrible but man was I wrong ! Okay, you're going to need amplification for your guitar or a V-AMP or something like it and a stereo cable with 1/4 inch connections because the 66 licks were recorded in stereo and the lead is on one side and the band is on the other. If you use a mono cable you will just get the band and you really need to hear these licks. Chris has the timing and nuance down to a science so the tab and notation are not enough. You can't notate a language and the blues is just that in musical form. The two demonstration solos were recorded together so for those two tracks (71, 72) I believe you do not need a stereo cable but the previous 66 tracks you absolutely do. Another thing is be careful with your hearing. I would recommend wearing plugs and limiting your headphone time to no more than an hour at a shot. In that hour you can perhaps work on 10 licks . Within a month you could absorb the whole book and then just go back from time to time to refresh. I go back and forth between this and jazz which is much easier on the ears. I like Pentatonic concepts by Steve Kahn because he presents all the theory with little intellectual challenges. These two guys are similar in their teaching skills with different musical orientations. Thanx to both of you !
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Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2008 by Slo-Hand
Format: Paperback
I have lots of licks books, and this one has really helped me to take my slow blues soloing one step ahead. I think the book is great if you put the time into memorizing licks that later will be second nature to you. If you do not want to put the time it takes it will be a waste of time, but if you do, you can experimenting with them, creating your own loops with your computer software or loop station. You can speed them up, transpose to different keys. The reason all the licks are in the same key is because that way you can learn to use them in each bar of the blues. It is true that it does not train you to play over shuffles, minor blues, or other styles. But the book is awesome for what it is. Do not expect to learn theory or scales because it only spends two pages in telling you what scales you are using. You would have to complete the theory with other books. As I say, the book is great for what it is, imagine that it provides you with 50-something cards and no matter how you arrange them in groups of 6 (12 bars)you always come out with a nice solo. Great for vocabulary.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2011 by Cliente Kindle
Format: Paperback
It's usable but I think it would be more usable to learn riffs if it included a demo of each riff along with it's backing track. The backing tracks are good to play along with, but beginners could profit from hearing the actual riff notes too. Other learning approaches via other authors do that so was expecting such from Mr Hunt. His approach to learning is valid, not just as effective as it could be in my humble.. neophyte opinion. I ahve about a dozen such learning book/CD publications... all ahve a demo of each riff... so the student can get a good sense of what supposed to sound like. Hunt's rendition is to jsut have you read tabs and play along with a quality backing track. At the end of CD 70+ tracks later, he plays a full solo and provides user a separate backing track.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2017 by Ronin One
Format: Paperback
This is the best book on "Electric Guitar" Blues I have ever used - nothing else comes close. It covers Chicago style blues - in places strongly reminiscent of Albert King and Roy Buchanan. The riffs are constructed in a "call and response" - but there's nothing basic about them. They are all usable, and many of them are surprisingly easy to play. There's nothing corny or academic in this book - it sounds fresh. These are real licks, not just scales or fretboard tricks. No open strings are used, so the riffs can be used in any key. In a very few places the tab isn't completely accurate, but even where its wrong its close enough for any guitarist to work out the correct version. The quality of the CD is excellent.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2006 by M. D. Bell
Format: Paperback
What this book has going for it is that it breaks down 12 bar blues into six 2 bar units, and it shows a lot of examples of riffs for each that you can mix and match in which ever sequence moves you. The CD is great for getting the emphasis and cadence of each riff, but I've had (some) good results by playing the riffs my own way. The book shows easy and hard riffs, low energy and high energy riffs (for staring a lead or launching into a second 12 bar lead, respectively), riffs what work better with the 'quick IV chord' progression, and some comments about many of the riffs and how to use them. I photocopied the 2 bar riffs that I wanted to try in various sequences and then cut & pasted them into various experimental 12 bar progressions. Some yeilded better results than others, but what was useful there was I got a feeling for which six 2 bar pairs went well in sequence and which did not. On the not-so-good side, the tablature uses harder to follow symbols for bending or releasing strings than most books use these days; a legend of the tab symbols used in this book would have been helpful eventhough you can get them from listening to the CD, I would have preferred to practice the fingering as intended in each example by reading the tabs before getting to the CD. Regarding the CD, I ran into problems trying to copy it into my lap top with Windows Media Player. But I was able to copy them just as files. Each of the 70+ example riffs begins with a voice announcing each example's number (e.g., Example 78), and a 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 beat count. I would have preferred no verbal label (they're on the file names already) and the beats seemed to all be the same so I didn't need that either. I wanted to be able to play them in sequence (even with the intro to each example) that I wanted to experiment with, but that hasn't worked very well. There are only three examples of whole 12 bar blues songs offered in the book, and while that was helpful, I would have liked more examples of the 2 bar riffs that all fit well together; even a few lines that sequenced me from one riff to an appropriate next riff (e.g., Examples 2, 14, 22, etc.) would have been really helpful.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2009 by Dennis
Format: Paperback
I have twenty or so books on electric blues guitar. Most of them are terrible. Riffs are mediocre or they're played without any context or even backing track. Hard to believe, but there's a lot of worthless junk out there. This one is different. The riffs are very cool sounding, the track is well done with guitar in one channel and the band in the other. And the context is completely broken down and memorable. In other words its easy, fun, and cool. If you're a beginning blues guitar player, or just wanting to learn to play, let me save you a LOT of time and hassle: First, GET THIS BOOK. Its ten bucks- that's less than the price of ONE LESSON at your local guitar store. Next, pick between two and four riffs from each section. Play them over and over until you can do it fluently. This could take weeks to months (not years) depending on where you start and how much you practice. Now start practicing the riffs over the song sections at the end of the CD- practice mixing them up and transposing octaves. See what sounds good. Next, continue the above, and learn and mix in the rest of the riffs from the book. Finally, with the riffs in this book in your arsenal, and your newly acquired sense of phrasing and dexterity, pick a blues guy that you like. NOT Hendrx. Someone like BB King, Albert King, or Freddie King- someone who sounds good, but isn't playing alot of pyrotechnics. Get yourself a little handheld microcassette recorder and record some tracks off your chosen CD- learn the riffs and the songs off the microcassette (very easy to quickly rewind a riff, many have different speeds- you can slow down a fast riff to learn it) Keep practicing and adding on. There you go. That's all you need. Follow this, and you WILL become a guitar god, or at least a lesser demon (ie Monday Night Blues Jammer)
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Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2008 by Kavity Killer