Joe Bonamassa

When the latest package from Schott arrived containing ‘Improvising Blues Guitar’ at Alloutguitar Towers - and we clocked it was written by John - we all looked forward to diving into this as one thing would be assured: Quality...

The basic structure of the book is that the essential key components of key guitarists from the dawn of Blues are examined - alongside the techniques and harmonic factors they brought to the genre and broken down into chapters (see below) with several musical performances and backing tracks for you to play along to, alongside detailed examination of the concepts, musical examples and loads of relevant chord/scale/arpeggio diagrams as appropriate.

With a player of John’s calibre one would expect the playing examples to be excellent, and they do not disappoint! Whilst all are accurate a few bear extra mentions: his Buddy Guy absolutely nails the mans vibrato; the BB King has a playful lightness of touch, the Robert Cray (a man hard to emulate) is so close... The Freddy King (absolutely required listening for those who wish to delve into Claptons original style) is a text book example of combining Major and Minor pentatonic phrase’s in a cohesive fashion. The Jeff Beck examples really nail that fake slide approach El Becko uses to such effect... I could go on but you get the idea!

For the rockier readers the Eric Johnson study provides a text book example of nailing this highly idiosyncratic player’s style, whilst the Gray Moore example portrays not only the Irish firebrands style to great effect, but also shows licks in their own right that could be from Paul Gilbert’s Pentatonic sequencing vocabulary and Viv Campbell’s speedy pentatonic repeating licks. The Joe Bonamassa example shows the debt he owes to many of the above players whilst showing his own slant on a genre that for many seemed moribund until his recent ascendance to global popularity.

With excellent Jazz blues players such as Larry Carlton and Robben Ford covered in equally comprehensive style as well as slide and ‘modern’ acoustic players covered this is pretty much all that you will ever need to truly nail the Blues!