Blues Learning Materials

SBassman · #1 03-04-2007, 09:08 PM

Since we just had a good dialog on the Tommy Shannon DVD, I thought I'd start a thread to try to collect up some mini reviews of various blues learning materials.

Have a blues book or DVD? Was it helpful? What level is it best for?

daffy · #2 03-04-2007, 10:15 PM

I found a couple of absolutely awesome books:

Jump and Blues Bass - Keith Rosier

Blues Bass - Ed Friedland

Both these books are killer blues books and have some fantastic transcriptions of blues standards, performance notes, style tips ands tricks and blues foundations. These would be a couple of my all time favourite resources. Ed's books is probably the more elementary of the two and it starts you from scratch, but it gets pretty hard core at the end. Keith's book is more advanced and assumes you can read and play at a reasonable level, but he covers so many blues styles and has brilliant examples of each player's style.

I have to say that Ed is my favourite instruction book author - he has a great way of explaining and he has really well constructed exercises, with great backing CD's as well. I believe he plays guitar himself and his blues book has a real drummer as backing, which gives it a more organic feel.

I also got Jon Liebman's Blues Bass and it was sort of OK, but it was just a licks book. Most of his books I find alright but a little disappointing to be honest. He also said that this one had a full backing band and it was a real let down - maybe I'm just spoilt by Ed and Keith.

edgewise · #3 03-07-2007, 10:42 AM

I second Ed Friedland's Blues Bass book. I've found it really helpful and as previously mentioned the accompanying cd is quite good.

SBassman · #4 03-09-2007, 09:37 AM

Pointer to a mini-review of Tommy Shannon's blues DVD I just posted to another thread:

http://www.talkbass.com/forum/showth...20#post3930920

Bottom line: highly recommended.

jonster · #5 01-08-2009, 03:50 PM

Ed Fridland's books are great. You might also like my fourth Hal Leonard book, Blues Bass. It's loaded with all kinds of blues grooves and solos in many different styles. It's quite popular. Check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks!

Jon Liebman