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Blues Guitar in 6 Weeks Albert King Style/week 6 - Steve Trovato Page One

Shazam! Its Albert King time mes enfants! I wont even pretend to explain just how influential a blues guitar player is Albert King. And a songsmith too. His lyrics are superb and among the most classic. One of the 3 Kings, in my opinion, Albert was in a class by himself, sang, and had a horn section in his band that really made a difference too.

Steve explains to us that we are going to play a slow blues in G over a mambo or is it rumba rhythm pattern. He additionally will teach us a new variation on the blues scale and we are going to combine it, using shift points with patterns we have already been exposed to previously in this guitar series.

As far as I could see we never do get an explanation of the mambo pattern. Its Albert's song Crosscut Saw is what it is. The backing track too.

So far Steve has been changing keys on us in each guitar lesson, here we are in G. His particular approach is interesting and different from starting the scale using a root note on the 6th or 5th string.

Starting in the middle of the 6 strings helps you recognize that there are about 4 octaves available to you without moving your hand more than a couple of frets. Steve doesn't call them octave centers but he points out that there are two instances of the root note G in the pattern he shows us and that if we draw and imaginary line between them we get a C-A-G-E-D shape.

Recall however there is no written material. In my opinion you need a guitar reference book in addition to this guitar lesson to get the big picture. However the beauty of this is that we are initially focused in on the one octave picture which is a moveable pattern in most instances so its not all so small after all. This is just a different way  of explaining it. It also serves the function of us playing horizontally and not just vertically along the neck using compound octaves.

Week Six Page Two

Role Models

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