If you’ve ever tried to improvise over a blues and ended up sounding like you’re just running up and down a scale, you’re not alone — and this course is exactly the answer. The difference between a guitarist who sounds like they know the blues and one who doesn’t usually comes down to vocabulary: the small, repeatable melodic fragments that the great players have made their own.
What this course covers: This course introduces you to Blues Bricks — short three and four-note melodic fragments that form the building blocks of authentic blues improvisation. You’ll learn ten essential bricks, understand how and where to deploy them in a 12-bar blues, and start building the vocabulary you need to sound like you really mean it.
I’d like to start with a quote;
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Bruce Lee
This quote is one of my favourites, as it gets to the true meaning of mastery in many forms of art: practice and internalisation of the basic components. Now, if we substitute the word “Licks” for “Kicks” then maybe you’ll get an idea for what this course is about:
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 Licks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one Lick 10,000 times.”
Blues fragments are three or four-note melodic ideas that you’ll hear your favourite blues players string together. Some are simple and instantly recognisable; others are more complex and colourful. But they’re all small enough to internalise deeply, and that’s exactly the point. By building your vocabulary of these little fragments, you’ll start to have a repertoire of things you can just put together and sound like a really good blues player.
One of the paths to excelling in any musical style is learning the vocabulary — the language, the elements of the style, the repertoire. Have you ever noticed one of your favourite guitarists play similar licks in all their solos, but somehow they don’t all sound the same? They place it differently, end it somewhere else every time, start on different beats, change the subdivisions. Stevie Ray Vaughan is a prime example: you can count the licks he plays on one hand, yet he never sounds like he’s repeating himself. He’s drilled those licks into his subconscious and now they’re there on command in a magnitude of ways.
These things are super helpful for making you sound like you know what you’re doing and giving you the vocabulary to play things relatively quickly that actually sound good.
When it comes to learning language and licks, there’s another great quote of Bruce Lee’s:
“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”
That’s the spirit to bring to these bricks. Learn them faithfully, then make them yours. The best way to start developing your ability to sound like an authentic blues player is by hand-selecting the blues fragments you want to become part of your playing, then morphing them into your own ideas by being creative and critical.
