Robert
Johnson is arguably the greatest blues guitar player of all time. (I
think Clapton said something similar).
If you've ever experienced that strange feeling of getting 'inside' his
music and 'feeling' it in the way Johnson himself must have done, then
I'm sure you can relate to what I mean.
So much has been written about his genius that it would be futile of me
to try adding anything.
This is your chance to re-create the kind of sounds that Robert Johnson
made all those years ago with his guitar.
What Do You
Get that is going to help you bring about this great musical feat?
Each of the three Song Lessons
comes as:
 Video download of the lesson
covering all parts of the song. These are proper lessons....not just a
quick playthrough. I explain each part in detail for you
Complete with the tabs to print
off so that you can keep at it even when you're not in front of the
computer.
tef©files. These are the
tabs made into a tef file which can be 'played' on your computer. You
can listen to the piece through, watch the tabs on-screen, slow down
sections, repeat sections (You'll also get the FREE tefview software
included on the download page)
Combining the learning tools in this way means that you'll master these
unusual techniques much
more easily and quickly than if you tried to figure them
out yourself.
It is close to having me
there in the room with you except that on video I never
get bored or distracted. You can watch any section over and over and
over until you have mastered the full piece.
This
will give you an amazing blues repertoire and make you the envy of
your fellow guitarists.
Malted
Milk.
Many
a fallen music star can blame the Malted Milk for their demise. Johnson
tries to make sense of the booze with this one. It is an unusual piece
as it contains one of the very few 'instrumental lead breaks' that
Johnson ever performed.
It has a quite distinctive rythmic form compared with many other Robert
Johnson Blues pieces and is a great favourite.
When
you've got a good friend.
This is in
the key of 'E' and is as straight forward a 12 bar blues as you can
imagine.
If this
song had been composed and performed by anyone other than Robert Johson
it would seem to be quite ordinary. The way Johnson treated it makes it
a really exciting piece to learn as it forms the basis of many
thousands of similar blues guitar pieces.
Once you
can play this one....a whole world of playing opens up for you.
Kind
hearted woman blues:
This was
the first song that Johnson recorded, and it was carefully crafted in
imitation of recent hit records.
It was
composed as if in answer to "Cruel Hearted Woman Blues" by Bumble Bee
Slim (Amos Easton), which in turn was based on "Mean Mistreater Mama"
by Leroy Carr accompanied by Scrapper Blackwell. Johnson uses the Carr
melody and conveys something of Carr's style in his relaxed singing.
His guitar accompaniment echoes Carr's piano phrases in the first
verse, then copies Blackwell's guitar phrases in the second verse. He
then adds a musical bridge in the style of another hit record, "Milk
Cow Blues" by Kokomo Arnold.
At the end
of the bridge, he jumps into a higher register as Arnold does, but then
maintains an extraordinary controlled falsetto, which may have been
based on the singing of Joe Pullum. Thus Johnson showed in his very
first recording that he had mastered the commercially successful urban
blues style of the Thirties. However, his debut cannot be dismissed as
derivative. He combined elements of the styles of others into a highly
individual style of his own
Like Bumble
Bee Slim, Johnson wrote lyrics consisting mostly of conventional twelve-bar three-line verses, but varied with an
eight-bar bridge. Slim's bridge merely repeated the words, but Johnson
wrote a more complex sequence.
Source:
wikipedia |
