Guitar Books Review #8: Fingerstyle Blues Guitar by Joseph Alexander

Is this one of the best or worst method books for fingerstyle blues guitar?

You can learn to play music using a variety of resources including teachers, online resources, and books.

Joseph Alexander’s Fingerstyle Blues Guitar (published by Fundamental Changes) is an excellent book for learning the fundamentals of fingerstyle blues guitar with either a monotonic or alternating bass. While this book does have some beginner-friendly material, it will especially resonate with intermediate or advanced players. It is also great for non-fingerstyle blues, rock, or jazz guitarists looking to cross over into fingerstyle blues. The first half of the book is focused on improvising lead melodies over a monotonic bass (mostly E minor pentatonic over an open 6th string), and the second half of the book is focused on blues chord progressions and picking patterns, soloing over blues progressions, turnarounds, bass lines, and two short studies.

This book presents lots of licks to teach you how to play over a monotonic bass line. If you haven’t ever improvised using pentatonic scales, then you may find yourself just learning and memorizing cool blues licks. If you really want to get the most out of this book, then you need to spend time incorporating the phrases into blues progressions and improvising your own blues phrases over blues progressions. I suggest mastering each example with the monotonic bass (open 6th string) and then playing it over a 12-bar blues progression. For each technique presented in the book, I suggest coming up with your own phrases using that technique – if the book presents examples using slides, then improvise using slides. Then improvise using slides over an entire 12-bar blues progression. A great practical goal would be to play actual blues tunes with some improv in the middle.

The second half of the book provides a bunch of accompaniment patterns over the I, IV, and V chords, and it provides some melodies on top of the chords. There is a section on turnarounds, a short section on bass lines, and a final section with two short “studies.” By the time you get through all of this you should have a decent idea of how to play a generic or improvised fingerstyle blues with a variety of feels in the keys of E and G. Aside from the studies, there aren’t any actual tunes in this book, but you’ll have the tools to learn them from other sources.

1. Authentic fingerstyle blues lines and grooves
2. Good difficulty graduation – examples build off each other and get gradually more complex and difficult. Cohesive feel especially to the first half of the book.
3. No actual fingerstyle blues tunes to learn other than two short studies.
4. Online audio access is really helpful – difficult rhythms and feel are much easier to learn with the audio tracks.
5. No fingerings for right or left hand for much of the book. Chapter 1 and Chapter 7 do have some picking hand fingering.
6. Some examples are difficult to play on an acoustic guitar because of whole step bends. You can always substitute slides for these big bends.

The book doesn’t get into the modern percussive techniques used by modern players like Michael Hedges, Don Ross, Andy McKee, Mike Dawes, etc. No thumb slaps, guitar body percussion, or tapping.

For most of the tunes you could use an acoustic steel string or electric guitar. You could use a nylon string classical guitar if necessary, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

eBook: Arranging for Fingerstyle Guitar: go to http://joemcmurray.com/checkout/ to purchase a pdf of my eBook.

Riding the Wave: my second fingerstyle guitar album is available on all streaming platforms.