This is a great lesson in blues guitar playing. Unassuming but authoritative It does exactly what it says it will too! Only better.
This is in my top ten list but not as the very first introduction to guitar playing that you purchase. You need to know some preliminary basics first.
Learning a Freddie King tune I'm Going Down* to start is never a bad idea! I am hoping that most people reading this are looking to learn about blues guitar and this will show you those backbone licks and riffs that begin to define the genre.
You couldn't ask for better subject stylistic material Freddie King, Elmore James, Scottie Moore, SRV, and B.B. King. I'm Going Down was written by Leon Russel and Don Nix and The Jeff Beck Group and many others cover it as well.
Basic licks and classic solos is a great introduction or a compliment to what you may have already in your guitar learning library. Its true that each instructor has their own style and Joe Weider, who, incidentally, replaced Robbie Robertson in The Band (and those are no small boots to fill), is a refreshing example and well deserves his accolades. You can hear it for yourself from the git go. Also his presentation is more than decent as he explains what it is you are doing and why you should be doing it quite well. He never looses site of the fact that we should have fun as we learn other wise we risk becoming dull boys and girls and merely mimicking.
Joe recommends to us, while demonstrating several tunes that's Its just a fun thing to play around with. Mess around with all those notes and in those positions and try that vibrato. Sage advice and since he has his own back up band and rhythm accompanist in the shape of Chris Zaloom they can and do show us how its done with elan.
You can really make some starting blues headway with your electric axe with this logical presentation of music theory via the pentatonic scale: the keys to blues improvisation.
We study the greats for the arrangements that made their styles similar but unique. Techniques such as bends, slurs, sliding in to the notes or gliss and vibrato are exemplified making you go I can do that? How does he make that look so simple hmmmmm? Let me try that. Vibrato can define your style too! Also the scale isn't just notes its also chords made up from those notes.
Some guitar teachers leave you feeling like you need to go for more lessons and more confused than when you started.
They might show you phrases licks and riffs and even show them to you slowly but without explaining anything at all about the theory while Jim Weider tell you to have fun and mess around with small easily digestible pieces of trade craft.
He doesn't put on airs or dumb you down and bravo to him! He starts at the beginning or close enough to it that you aren't over whelmed.
Everyone should practice their pentatonic scales in the five positions up and down the neck with a metronome and be able to after a few hours/days months weeks of sincere practice transpose them and learn to connect them too.
It tedious training your eye, hands and muscle memory but it needs to be done and will separate the mice from the men. The guitar context of this lesson setting is inspirational. What does that mean? It means if you copy Jim you will develop an understanding of how to play guitar up and down the neck and not just in one position. Copying is good. Everyone copies and digests and regurgitates. I have always wanted to use regurgitates in a sentence and there you go! But its true - you want to get so good you are in the mood to play music.
Eighty percent of success is showing up. – Woody Allen