After four years of close calls, fitful paranoia and at least a couple "Seriously? That wasn't it either?" moments, the Covid finally caught up with me last weekend. I have to admire its tenacity. Or maybe I'm just a late bloomer. I did also get the chicken pox at twenty-eight, which was about as unfun as it sounds. I had to quarantine then, too; I used the time to write the second draft of my first book, Beginning Blues Guitar, which was ultimately also published in French with the totally excellent title Debutante Blues Guitar, so it wasn't a total bust.

For the past several days, whenever I wasn't completely zonked, or distracting myself with the superlative literature of Edgar Eager and Ellen Raskin, I was putting the finishing touches on the PDF for this weekend's Reliable Source workshop, Chord Melody Blues. As often happens, a lot has ended up on the cutting room floor, in an effort to distill the material down into the most practical, most musical and most exciting examples.

There is something particularly fascinating about chords, and especially chord sequences that work both melodically and harmonically. Each cool chord-based lick that you learn may seem one-of-a-kind at first, but ideally, over time, you can take it apart, figure out what makes it tick, and then use it for more than just the one purpose you initially learned it for.

In tomorrow's workshop, we'll use a three-step process to learn and understand a variety of chord-based approaches to soloing on the blues in Bb. First, we'll look at a handful of related voicings – 6th, 9th, 13th and altered chords, mostly, on the top four strings – and clarify why they're named what they named, and how they function.

Next, we'll put them to use in various twelve-bar blues examples, creating melodies out of everything from riff-based rhythms and common tone voicings to harmonized blues licks, chord fragments and tritone substitutions.

Finally, we'll see how to swap one- to two-bar single-note licks back into those same twelve-bar examples, to create solos with a compelling mix of swing and blues lines and chord-melody phrases.

You can still register for Chord Melody Blues at the link below. While attending live gives you the chance to ask me questions as we go via the live chat, everyone who registers gets a year of on-demand access to a complete replay of the two-hour workshop. So if you're interested in the workshop but can't be there live, you can still sign up and get access to all the same material, presented exactly the same way, if you watch it later.

Register for the Chord Melody Blues Workshop

Last Friday's Youtube lesson previewed one way to use this chord-melody approach over the first four bars of a blues, while this past Tuesday's lesson showed one of my favorite ways to approach the middle four bars. Today's Youtube lesson wraps things up with a look at a classic chord-melody blues turnaround:

Chord Melody Blues Turnarounds

Each of these three Youtube lessons illustrates one aspect of the kind of material we'll be covering in the workshop. And if you put them all together, they make a complete twelve-bar chord-melody chorus. In fact, I've included the tab for these three recent lessons in the workshop PDF, along with all the other material.

If you missed those earlier Youtube lessons, you can now find them on the workshop registration page, along with an FAQs section and all the other information about tomorrow's class. Hope to see you there!

Register for the Chord Melody Blues Workshop

More soon,

David