Free Lesson Friday

Here are eight short lessons to help you learn how to bend notes like Albert King & Stevie Ray Vaughan. These lessons are from the 1-Minute Blues “Shorts” series.

If you’re serious about learning to play like Stevie Ray Vaughan or Albert King, check out the related courses below.

I picked up this lick from a Smokin’ Joe Kubek song, and it reminded me of something Jimi Hendrix played over the V chord in Red House. In this lesson I’ll show you where this pattern comes from and how to use it over the V and the IV chord during the last 4 bars of a 12-bar blues solo.

If you invest the time to learn Texas Flood, take the time to learn the ending correctly.

Learn a very cool Freddie King blues lick from the song Me And My Guitar, taken from the Texas Cannonball album. This lick fills up the last 4 bars of the 12-bar progression and it sounds best with a 70s wide collar shirt.

The syncopated, funky intro to Couldn’t Stand The Weather can be intimidating if you’ve not learned how to incorporate some of the funky Hendrix rhythm into your playing yet. This lesson is all about the ‘core’ of the riff - I break it into two parts and show you a couple different ways to play each.

In this lesson I dissect one of the most impossible looking techniques that Stevie Ray Vaughan used. Found in songs like Tin Pan Alley and Dirty Pool, this fast ‘tremolo’ picking technique requires speed and endurance. I’ll talk about how to gradually increase your speed, the importance of consistency and endurance, and talk about the back-and-forth movement that Stevie did as he used this technique.

This is the final lesson in the Hendrix Machine Gun Vamping series. In this lesson I’ll show you a couple licks that help to round out the collection we’ve built but I’ll also show you a couple of ‘themes’ to use as you play in this style. These themes can really help you to play in this style for longer without sounding boring or repetitive.

Here’s how to play that signature ascending lick from SRV’s song “Tell Me” off of his debut album “Texas Flood”. I taught this lick incorrectly a few years ago, and it’s actually simpler than I thought.

There is no feeling like looking back over your DOCUMENTED progress, a record of what you’ve worked on and accomplished. That feeling is the goal you need to keep in mind when you’re tempted to skip the simple step of writing down what you accomplished in your guitar study each day. Think of that feeling, and let the gravity of that satisfaction pull you through the chore of writing today’s work down.

Download the course progress trackers here.

Michael Palmisano turned me on to a video of Prince playing his song “Cream” on acoustic guitar, and there’s an awesome blues lick right in the middle that jumped out at me as soon as he played it.

The Original Video

Michael Palmisano Prince Reaction Video

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