Is It Easy?
Published: Mon, 09/18/23
The book was actually pretty good, mostly because halfway through we paused the pages of chord frames to have a whole section on how chords are built and how they get their names. So the book was fun to write, but it wasn't exactly a cash cow, or even a cash calf.
Overall, I think the problem with chord books, or any other supposedly definitive resource, is that they make things look harder, not easier. I'm an inveterate consumer of how-to books, but these days I tend to choose the thinnest ones I can find. I don't want an exhaustive treatment of anything at this point; I want something I think I'm going to be able to actually comprehend and put to use, and the narrower the scope, the more likely that is.
The thing is, playing the guitar is not easy. Above all, it takes time. Some people move faster than others, but not only does absorbing ideas take time, there's simply no way to accelerate the basic coordination it takes to remember and execute new chords, scales or licks, any more than you can build up your lungs and your muscles any faster if you want to be a distance runner or do X number of chin-ups.
So it's a drag when anyone promises a quick fix for how to play better, and I try and avoid making those kinds of promises altogether. But what I can do is act as a filter, prioritizing certain things, removing others from the table, and suggesting in what order to address what remains. I can try and make it easi-er.
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As I discussed at length in my last video, Learn To Play In One Key First, if you have a taste for adding jazz elements into your blues playing, you don't have to eat the whole elephant – not at first, maybe not ever. In today's Youtube lesson, we take a big, confusing subject – what exactly are altered scales, and where do they belong in the blues progression? – and narrow the focus to one three-note arpeggio that works in one specific four-bar section of a blues in one key, G minor.
Once you know how to do that, sure, you can move it to other keys or figure out other moments in the blues progression where it might also work. But that will be a lot easier to do once you have one specific fingering and one specific instance hardwired into your vocabulary. You can find the lesson at the link below:
Easy Altered Licks On The Blues
I will, of course, be covering this idea in more – but not an overwhelming amount more – detail in my upcoming Reliable Source workshops; you can learn more and sign up at the following link:
Reliable Source: Minor Blues Workshop Series
More soon,
David