‘Serious Blues’ from Alfred Music

Alfred Music's Serious Blues series features book and DVD packs for aspiring blues guitarists in search of an authentic sound. Each title features lessons from bona fide blues masters and includes licks and examples in both standard notation and TAB. 

Designed for more experienced beginners, Scott A. Smith’s Serious Blues: Essential Phrasing teaches all the phrasing techniques and tricks users need to become a blues master. These techniques include concepts like solo construction, phrasing over a 12-bar blues, the blues scale, pentatonic box patterns, and playing multiple scales over a single chord. Smith also covers essential blues techniques like trills, slides, rakes, bending, target notes, initial and destination notes, pre-bends, and how to combine bends with box patterns in his in-depth lessons.

Mark Dziuba’s Serious Blues: Expanding Grooves helps intermediate guitarists expand their groove palette. Dziuba breaks down and explains shuffle and straight rhythms, 12/8 feel, triplets, blues forms, minor blues, and various blues rhythm tricks like chord fills, accents, sliding into chords, and open-string drones. Additionally, Dziuba explores harmonic concepts, like chord extensions and advanced voicings, plus rhythms from music beyond the blues like the Charleston and Latin montuno.

Intended for late-intermediate players, Eric Slone’s Serious Blues: Expanding Lead & Rhythm covers essential lead and rhythm topics like transposition, call-and-response, targeting chord tones, arpeggios, scales, fills between vocals, pinch harmonics, rakes, Texas power rhythm in the style of Stevie Ray Vaughan, chord progressions, and extended chords. Slone also runs through grooves in the jazz blues, funk blues, and jump blues styles.

The included DVDs are hosted by the authors and feature live demonstrations of the examples in the books.

The Serious Blues book and DVD packages are now available for $16.99 each at music retail stores and at alfred.com/guitar.