Course Description – What’s in the Lessons?
Each lesson begins with Jim playing the entire song, at complete speed. This is good to enjoy, although it can seem a little daunting, when you realize you’ll be discovering to play the very same tune!
Then the lesson itself starts, as Jim breaks the tune right down into little, manageable areas that you can work on in a session. He likewise slows it right down, making it a lot easier to follow along.
In the relevant sections of the video, the guitar tab or chord/fingering charts are shown in the lower part of the screen, making it simple to follow – how sure fire way to discover how to play the guitar appropriately.
One thing that can seem hard when you’re finding out to play finger choosing blues guitar, is coordinating the selecting action from your right-hand man, with altering chords and worrying notes with the left. In each of the lesson videos, Jim shows closeups of both the ideal hand selecting method and the left hand chord positions, so you can see more easily what’s occurring.
Each of the various tune sections are then created, so you can soon make progress towards playing more total parts of the tune.
In a few of the videos (e.g. Crossroads), Jim likewise covers knowing to play slide or traffic jam guitar, which is the basis of a timeless ‘blues’ noise. The video areas on this are clear, with great closeups, and Jim gives some helpful tips on how best to use the slide, for example, on how best to moisten the undesirable noises with your left hand, which is an important skill to master if you desire to get the finest slide guitar noise.
The slide guitar lessons use an alternative guitar tuning, and Jim discusses clearly how to change the tuning of each string, before you begin the lesson itself. Just like the other lessons, the guitar tab is shown in the lower area of the screen, mentioning where to utilize the slide.
Also in the lessons, there are convenient suggestions on singing the verses while playing. Jim takes private lines from the verses, and shows where the words fit into the guitar part. This is really beneficial details, as it’s one thing to understand how to play the guitar part by itself, and another thing to be able to play and sing at the exact same time.
Simply having the lyrics drawn up under the tab isn’t always adequate to determine exactly where to come in with the vocals, so having this showed clearly like this helps a lot. The video listed below features Jim singing and demonstrating part of ‘When You’re Down and Out’ by Scrapper Blackwell.
Support
Assistance for the lessons is by email, and I’ve constantly discovered Jim to be really responsive and quick to return to me when I have actually had a question
Total – Our Verdict
I found Jim’s Complete Blues & Ragtime Fingerpicking Guitar Course to be a very efficient and useful way to learn how play the guitar. I liked the way that each video is entirely devoted to discovering a specific song, so that after working through all of the videos, you wind up with an entire set of tunes for your collection, along with a great variety of finger selecting strategies and licks that you can include into other pieces.
To learn to play tunes in this style of music, I think it’s very essential to get a sense of how the tune need to sound as an entire, prior to learning each section, which’s simply what you get with these videos, with Jim offering his rendition at the start, so you can see and hear what you need to go for. I thought that the method the tune was divided into little sections, and slowed right down, made it simple to deal with parts of the tune in a single session, before linking the areas together.
There are plenty of closeups of both the right and left hand positions on the videos, which will help you perfect each section. I discovered the left hand closeups particularly helpful, as just seeing the tab or chord signs for a section doesn’t always offer enough details on playing more complicated areas – watching the left hand closeup clip over a couple of times really assisted me here.
I likewise liked seeing the ‘street’ variation on the ‘Secret To The Highway’ video, where Jim shares his experience of playing this tune in a live setting. It’s one thing to discover how to play the guitar in carrying out the ‘regular’ variation, however extremely useful to see how to modify this into the ‘street’ variation to provide your playing some more ‘zest’ when carrying out for an audience.
If you can play the basic open chords, and you’re aiming to enter finding out some more finger style/finger picking or slide acoustic guitar, then I would definitely recommend taking a better take a look at this course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BR5icY3sFI
