Blues by the Bar: Cool Riffs That Sound Great over Each Portion of the Blues Progression

Chris Hunt is a New York City-based guitarist, composer, and producer with a long list of top-flight credits and a solid educational background (Berklee School of Music). The concept of the book is fresh and well-grounded in the notion of the blues as an improvisational art. The author has broken a twelve-bar slow blues into six two-bar segments and provided a variety of examples of what you might do in each segment. If you study and absorb all of the examples, it will fill you with ideas for each part, and you will find yourself synthesizing new ideas from the fabric of old ideas. That's what improvisation is all about. It is also quite a technical workout, which is bound to give you more freedom of expression.There has apparently been some effort to keep the first example in each group relatively simple. However, the complexity curve rises steeply after that, which is why this is not a book for beginners. There are plenty of sixteenth notes throughout, and the bending is subtle. The phrasing is surprisingly good, which clearly shows that the author has absorbed the styles of the masters.Contrary to what is said in the negative review, the notation is standard notes plus tab, so there is plenty of information to work with. However, it would have been better if there was more, because there are some things that tab and standard notation can not portray. In example 3, for instance, a rake is indicated by grace-note "x"s on the pitches G and A, but the tab below it shows more accurately that they are on strings 5 and 4. You can figure out which one is correct because it can't possibly be "G and A," but it would be better if both types of notation agreed, so why not place the x's on the appropriate open-string notes in standard notation? Also, this is a point where performance notes would help. Exactly how and where do you mute the strings, and what should you watch out for (such as unintentional harmonics)? By the way, the rake is actually not on the third beat of the first measure, as shown, but on the second beat of the second measure, which indicates some sloppiness in editing. The same comments might be made about the rake-and-slide on the fourth beat of the second measure. Do you rake three open strings (5,4,3) that are muted and then drag your finger (which finger?) down the strings? This doesn't work. Not even close. It's pretty clear to me how he executed the rake-and-slide, but it should be spelled out, with performance notes added where needed. Perhaps the author was thinking, "Everybody knows how to do this," but he owes it to the audience to be as complete and true and accurate as possible. By the way, this is one of the most irritating things about modern electric guitar notation. It goes almost all the way, but pulls back and leaves you hanging just when it's about to finish the job. When you watch a video, it turns out to be simple, after all. Or not. But at least the notation should be complete and accurate. Authors owe that to the readers at minimum.The guitar used in the recording sounds good, so it would have been nice if there had been some equipment notes, which is pretty standard in magazines these days (see "Guitar Techniques"). Books haven't quite caught up, for some strange reason. It would have been helpful if Hunt had added a note to each example that said something like, "In the style of," and gave a discography. There's a lot of unused space on the pages, so it would have been easy. The blues scale breakdown at the beginning of the book includes left-hand fingering, but left-hand fingering is absent where it really counts: in the examples. If Hunt wanted to score a classic, he might have corrected all those faults, which are not unique to this book, but found in most guitar books. He might also have explained how to release or kill a bent note properly. There isn't a single source anywhere on the Web or in print, as far as I know, that does this, and yet it is obvious that ending a bend is a critical technique. Since there's more than one way to do it and a bunch of ways to do it wrong, it really demands some explanation.These faults make Hunt's book no worse than hundreds of others, and the concept and the examples he uses to flesh it out are way above average, so the book is a worthwhile investment. It could have been better if the author had shown more consideration for the audience, which is why I deducted one star. I recommend the book without hesitation.

What this book has going for it is that it breaks down 12 bar blues into six 2 bar units, and it shows a lot of examples of riffs for each that you can mix and match in which ever sequence moves you.The CD is great for getting the emphasis and cadence of each riff, but I've had (some) good results by playing the riffs my own way.The book shows easy and hard riffs, low energy and high energy riffs (for staring a lead or launching into a second 12 bar lead, respectively), riffs what work better with the 'quick IV chord' progression, and some comments about many of the riffs and how to use them.I photocopied the 2 bar riffs that I wanted to try in various sequences and then cut & pasted them into various experimental 12 bar progressions. Some yeilded better results than others, but what was useful there was I got a feeling for which six 2 bar pairs went well in sequence and which did not.On the not-so-good side, the tablature uses harder to follow symbols for bending or releasing strings than most books use these days; a legend of the tab symbols used in this book would have been helpful eventhough you can get them from listening to the CD, I would have preferred to practice the fingering as intended in each example by reading the tabs before getting to the CD.Regarding the CD, I ran into problems trying to copy it into my lap top with Windows Media Player. But I was able to copy them just as files. Each of the 70+ example riffs begins with a voice announcing each example's number (e.g., Example 78), and a 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 beat count. I would have preferred no verbal label (they're on the file names already) and the beats seemed to all be the same so I didn't need that either. I wanted to be able to play them in sequence (even with the intro to each example) that I wanted to experiment with, but that hasn't worked very well.There are only three examples of whole 12 bar blues songs offered in the book, and while that was helpful, I would have liked more examples of the 2 bar riffs that all fit well together; even a few lines that sequenced me from one riff to an appropriate next riff (e.g., Examples 2, 14, 22, etc.) would have been really helpful.

Once you know some basic blues theory and have the five pentatonic minor scales in your fingers and know how to connect them together, playing up and down the neck in any key, then (and only then) a book like this is invaluable.Like most people who reach this stage, I found myself being able to play some good sounding blues pieces but being rubbish at improvising... playing all the right notes but sounding dull and aimless. This book has 70 licks for either bars 1 & 2 or 3 & 4 or 5 & 6 or 7 & 8 or 9 & 10 or 11 & 12 of the 12 bar blues progession. Some are pretty easy, some pretty difficult and plenty in between. Rather than starting with lick 1 and learning them all consecutively, I have gone through the whole book learning the easy and medium/easy licks in each section... this means I can start playing them over the 12 bar blues backing tracks at the end of the CD, while working on the remaining medium/difficult and difficult licks.Unlike another similar book/CD package I reviewed, I was relieved to find the CD plays the licks over a back beat, which means it is much much easier to learn the phrasing. Everything is in G... this is also good as it means you can practice connecting all the licks with each other. But once in the fingers and memory, the next stage will be transposing them to other keys. Although some of the licks are fast, with sixteenth notes or shorter, everything is played over a pretty slow blues progression. Go to a pub and start jamming and you may find you have to ask the other band members to slow things right down... the licks in this book are more for playing mellow blues BB King style rather than for jamming over faster pieces. I like this... at some stage there'll be more work for me, learning to play wilder stuff... but learning the blues is a never ending process, it's important both to make progress and to enjoy the journey - this book enables me to do both.One practical gripe - each lick is a track on the CD and starts with a few seconds silence, which is perfect, but the nano-second the lick finishes the CD moves on to the silence at the start of the next track. If you decide you want to play your original lick again you have to remember to double-press the back button to get back to the start of that track - keeping pressing it just the once and you'll keep going back just a second or two to the start of the subsequent one. Sounds hardly worth mentioning? You're right, it's very minor indeed, but irritating nevertheless!Anyway, that one thing aside, if you are at the guitar-learning stage I describe at the top of this review, the stage I am at, then this book is the near-perfect tool to help you move your improvisation on to a much more dynamic level.

This book and CD helped me finally learn how to structure a blues solo. You can mix and match the riffs to create endless variations. It also helped me realize how to mix the major and minor blues scales in one riff rather than playing them separately. And it showed me how to use different rhythmic attacks to make the same riff sound completely different. Plus, it forced me to fret in a bluesy way rather than the way I'd been taught in classical technique. The real fun starts when you've memorized the riffs and they start to pop out in new ways while you are improvising. Highly recommended but probably not for beginners.

well posted

In a way, I would have preferred to have given this book and hour and a half stars out of five, because of what several previous reviewers have noted - that Chris Hunt could (and should) have provided more context about which part(s) of the major or minor pentatonic scales the examples of licks in this book are based on and taken from.However, I do think that the licks and riffs in the book are useful, and that the examples included span a range of difficulty from relatively easy to moderately difficult.In fact, the more I work my way through this book, the more useful I find the licks, and there are rich learning rewards to be had in doing a little work to try to visualize what part of the minor or major pentatonic scales (or both) from which the licks are taken.I really do feel that this book is one of the most useful for the advanced beginner, or intermediate player who is looking to add to their 'vocabulary' of licks that sound good and that are not that difficult to play.I will definitely be looking at other books by Chris Hunt.My wish list for a revised version of this book would include:1. The aforementioned contextualization of the riffs/licks (i.e., whether they are based on the major or minor pentatonic or blues scale - or a mix of these scales)2. A section including different chord inversions, which would enable people to play the rhythm parts in different ways (e.g., using sevenths, ninths and other types of chords, and using different inversions of those chords in different places on the neck)3. A section on Intro.'s and Turnarounds (especially the latter).I should clarify here: the licks for bars 11 and 12 are, in fact, turnarounds, but I would like to have more of them, and to a clear section heading that labels these 'Turnarounds' (Chris Hunt does this in the text description, but there is no heading with this title).

Good overview of 12 bar blues progression, nice summary of pentatonic scale positions, and lot's of cool riffs - unfortunately there's little if any explanation of how each riff ties into everything. The player is pretty much on his own when trying to deconstruct the riffs themselves.