Improving Your Ear for The Country Blues Guitarist

Product Description In this lesson John Miller will provide you with the tools you need to develop your ability to tell what position or tuning a Country Blues performance was played out of simply by listening to the recording. Believe it or not, this is a learnable skill and John, who has taught it for many years, will show you what to listen for and help you get started hearing the various auditory clues that identify the distinctive sound of the different playing positions and tunings most commonly used in Country Blues guitar playing. Developing your ability to do this kind of informed listening, or listening with knowledge will reap significant rewards for your playing, most especially improving your ability to learn by ear and increasing the speed with which youÆre able to pick up new material.One of the real advantages of having this material presented in this 2DVD format is that it allows John to go over the material in real detail, presenting the sound characteristics of the different playing positions and tunings at length, and providing you with memory devices to help you remember the sound of alternating bass for the different positions and tunings. The material is not presented in the abstract, either - as John goes along, he plays a host of examples drawn from Country Blues performances that help illustrate and exemplify the characteristic sound of each playing position. The PDF study guide that accompanies the lesson includes a summary of the sound characteristics that identify each of the playing positions/tunings presented in the lesson, as well as the memory devices that will help you remember the sound of the bass in the different positions. Also included on the DVD is a test to take when you have completed the lesson, with a selection of recordings of Country Blues played out of different positions and tunings for you to identify using your new skills. Disc One: E position, standard tuning ò C position, standard tuning ò D position, standard tuning ò A position, Standard tuningDisc Two: G position, standard tuning ò F position, standard tuning ò Dropped-D tuning ò Vestapol tuning ò Spanish tuning230 minutes ò Level 1 ò Detailed PDF booklet file on the DVD DVD is region 0, playable worldwide. About the Actor At the age of 12, John Miller was inspired to play the guitar after seeing Mississippi John Hurt perform at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. he bought his first guitar at the age of 16 and launched into an intensive period of study of Country Blues guitar, learning the music of John Hurt, Mance Lipscomb, Bo Carter, Blind Blake, and other greats. By the time he was twenty-seven, John had released five solo albums to international critical acclaim. Those albums ranged from Country blues and Old Time country music to the songs of George Gershwin. For the next 15 years, John focused on teaching, founding two music camps, composing, and building a vocabulary in Jazz and Latin music. In the last seven years, John has released CDs with a Jazz trio, Catwalk, duos with mandolinist John Reischman, violinist Ruthie Dornfeld, singer Becky Kilgore, and French cabaret music with the ensemble Rouge. Says Miller of his musical travels, I ve played many many different styles of music in recent years, but I ve come to realize that everything I ve done has been informed by my early involvement with Country Blues and the lessons I learned from that music: the primacy of rhythm and the need to communicate with clarity and strength of purpose. I strive for those qualities in the music I play, and I hope that what I do honors the memory of my heroes, like John Hurt, who have passed on.