Truefire - Richard Van Bergen's 50 Down Home Blues Licks You Must Know

Hi, I'm Richard Van Bergen. Welcome to 50 Down Home Blues Licks You MUST Know! John Lee Hooker once said: "I don’t play a lot of fancy guitar. The kind I play is mean!". This quote is a summary of the content of this course. From the swamps of Louisiana to the smoky clubs and juke joints in the metropole, these licks and grooves are going to take you down the roughest roads of the blues. Blues music in general is a simple musical form, with no fancy harmonies and chord changes. Maybe because of that, so many blues players were able to create their own personal style within this framework. This is the main subject of this course. We will dig into the styles of bluesmen like Jimmy Rogers, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker and Frankie Lee Sims.

These artists linked the pre-war country blues to electrified blues, played by bands in clubs in cities like Chicago, Houston and Detroit. We will focus on slide guitar when we analyze the playing of Fred McDowell, Robert Nighthawk and Johnny Shines. And any course containing mean and agressive blues playing isn’t complete without B.B., Freddie and Albert King! We won’t play single string licks only. You can’t play solos all the time, now can you? Swampy grooves and boogie-rhythms are an equally important part of this course. If you want to be an all around bluesplayer you have to be able to play rhythm guitar too. In this collection we will also cover subjects like bends, chromatic lines, phrasing, vibrato, rakes, double-stops and chord shapes. I play most licks with my bare fingers, which gives me an enormous dynamic range. But you can use a pick too. Although we’ll dig into the source, by analyzing the styles of the masters, I encourage you to integrate all of these influences into your own playing. Let’s spread the word and keep this beautiful music alive!