Jim Bruce Complete Blues Guitar Course Review

Overall

Do you want to do more than just playing basic acoustic guitar chords, and learn some exciting techniques, like  finger picking blues and bottleneck guitar? Alternatively, you may have some experience in finger picking guitar, but would like to know more about blues and ragtime picking.

The Jim Bruce Complete Blues & Ragtime Fingerpicking Guitar Course is a series of very detailed guitar lessons videos with tablature, which will show you how to play  acoustic blues, ragtime and bottleneck guitar, in the styles of such blues artists as  Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Blake, and Robert Johnson.

Each video  in the package demonstrates how to play acoustic blues guitar by featuring a complete song in a particular style, covering small sections at a time.

Course Teacher

Jim Bruce has been around a long time and is a  respected guitarist in the field of acoustic blues & ragtime. He has  recorded four albums so far, but prefers teaching and playing live. He is a working bluesman, spending a lot of time of time playing blues and ragtime guitar music on the streets and in the bars of Europe, and  has many years of real experience in singing these blues songs.

This experience shows in the course. Let me take one example, for the song for 'Key To The Highway', he shows us the 'regular' and 'street' version of this classic tune, indicating that the 'street' version is aimed towards a live performance. This is a great way to learn the blues.

Contents of the Course

What's in the Lessons?

Jim plays the whole song at the beginning of a lessons, at normal tempo. This is interesting to see, particulary when you realise you'll be playing the same thing quite soon!

As the lesson unfolds, Jim splits the tune into discrete sections that you can practice easily. This initial pace is slow, making it very easy to follow. The short video below shows the opening part 'Blue Day Blues' (Scrapper Blackwell)

In the slow sections of the lesson, the tablature or chord diagrams are shown on the screen, which is great to follow.

A thing that can be hard to achieve when learning to play finger style blues guitar, is coordinating the actions of both right and left hands. In these video lessons, Jim shows closeups of the right hand picking technique and also the left hand chord positions, so you can see easily everything that's going on.

Each of the different song sections are then put together, so you can soon make progress towards playing more complete parts of the song.

In some of the lessons (e.g. Crossroads), Jim also shows how to play slide or bottleneck , which is  a classic delta blues sound. The video instructions on this are very clear, with great closeup work, and Jim shows how best to use the slide, for example, on how to damp the sounds with your left hand, which is very important if you want to get the best bottleneck sound.