Rating: 
Summary: Great Lessons for Learning the Blues
Review: I am a beginning blues guitar player. I bought a number of books but have found that "Blues you can use" is the only one that I practice. I love all of the tunes and I like the progressions that are used. I've only had the book for a month and already I can play 4 of the lessons, and I'm real happy about that. I strongly recommend this book if you want to learn to play Blues lead guitar.
Rating: 
Summary: Blues You Can Use
Review: I found this to be an excellent book that covered things which I wish I had found in other "beginner/intermediate" books. It had, in my opinion, one very major flaw. The fret diagrams are upside down and right to left (as if you were playing left handed). Why the author strays from convention is beyond me, It was an annoyance.
Rating:
Summary: Top notch stuff!
Review: I've been playing for about 6 years, and was looking for something to put some "tastefullness" into my playing. this book is excellent for that. It's composed of 21 lessons - each lesson includes a rhythm part and a lead part. There are several pages of text with each lesson, explaining in detail what you're learning, laying out the theory behind it, and telling you how to use it. For instance, you start with a basic 12 bar blues progression using 7th chords in open position, then move to moveable 7th chords, then 9th chords, and learn some variations on those chords and how to use them. You learn the pentatonic minor scale box by box, then once you've got it over the whole fretboard, you start moving from one position to another within a solo. You learn this piece by piece, a little more scale work, a little more rhythm work, in each lesson. Then you play a song that uses what you just learned. There are quite a variety of styles of blues on the CD, from delta blues to funk, minor blues, major blues, and a fair amount of rock/blues stuff.I think it's excellent the way the book is laid out. As soon as you've learned something new, you immediately get to use it in a song. And the songs get progressively harder as you go. You also gain a real understanding of how to play the blues, not just how to play the specific songs in the book. I wouldn't really recommend this if you're a complete beginner. Although the first few lessons are very easy, by the middle of the book I think a beginner would start having a really hard time with the solos. It's more for people who have been playing for a while and want to get into the blues. One small complaint is that on the CD, the rhythm guitar is way in the background. It's hard to hear the strumming patterns, you really have to pay attention. On the good side, each solo is played twice on each track, and that makes it much better to practice to. If you don't get it quite right the first time through, you get a second chance! I think that's a neat motivational technique. I'm enjoying this book immensely.
Rating:
Summary: Gets You Off The Beginner Plateau
Review: I've played guitar for over 20 years but never graduated beyond just playing chords and singing my favorite rock & pop tunes. This book actually got me off the guitar playing plateau I've been stuck on for decades and renewed my interest in the guitar which I had lost. For me this book/CD has proved to be priceless.
Rating:
Summary: Gets You Off The Beginner Plateau
Review: I've played guitar for over 20 years but never graduated beyond just playing chords and singing my favorite rock & pop tunes. This book actually got me off the guitar playing plateau I've been stuck on for decades and renewed my interest in the guitar which I had lost. For me this book/CD has proved to be priceless.
Rating:
Summary: Gets You Off The Beginner Plateau
Review: I've played guitar for over 20 years but never graduated beyond just playing chords and singing my favorite rock & pop tunes. This book actually got me off the guitar playing plateau I've been stuck on for decades and renewed my interest in the guitar which I had lost. For me this book/CD has proved to be priceless.
Rating:
Summary: Great as a practice tool
Review: It's not a beginner's guide to playing guitar but a beginner's guide to playing blues.
I have been learning to play the guitar for 6 months now and wanted to explore the blues genre.
This is a very good book to do so. It slowly opens up blues in an approachable and structured manner.
Unlike most learn-to-play books, there are very little diagrams and pictures, so people (including me) may get a little disorientated at first, but after careful reading and some tinkering around with the guitar, you really get to understand the guitar more.
Remember, it's not a beginner's guide to playing guitar but a beginner's guide to playing blues.
Some people may feel that the tracks in the CD are hard to follow because of the backing band, but I feel that it helps to train my ear to separate the different positions (lead, rhythm, bass etc) and it's definitely more interesting than a background metronome.
I highly recommend it for people interested in playing the blues.
Rating:
Summary: Practical and no nonsense - high recommendation
Review: Should be considered a standard learning book for students of blues guitar. The material presented will enable you to have good understanding of a variety of blues styles. This book is not for the absolute beginner. If you are just picking up a guitar you might find the chord voicings presented too difficult to form. But if you can play even some basic chord forms and/or have any prior blues experience you will get lots out of this book. If you work the material presented you will be rewarded.
Rating:
Summary: Very solid learning tool
Review: The whole problem with this type of book is the scope of the subject. How can you introduce the blues, or for that matter any genre of music, in one volume? The answer is that you can't. There is theory, there is practice routine, there is technique, there are idiosyncracies of musical notation, and there is the music itself (the particular music the book presents for you to learn). Any given book can only hope to touch on all of these. But this book does a pretty good job. The theory introduced is pretty minimal, actually--you'd have to go to other sources for that--but that's understandable. The music that you get to learn is mostly pretty good. Not too hard to learn, but not exactly easy either (this book is by no means for a raw beginner), and it all sounds pretty cool. I've been playing for about 3-1/2 years now. I got the book about three weeks ago, and I'm nearly half way through it. (I usually practice at least two hours a day.) I haven't come up against anything that I couldn't learn, given some patient practice. I'm finding snippets of music from the book working their way into my playing. That's the best possible sign that the book was worth the money.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Blues Intro
Review: This book and cd cover a variety of blues styles. John Ganapes emphisises learning the blues pattern, and he gives many excercises to really burn the patterns in memory. He gives a good variety of coards (7ths, 9ths, etc.), and he gives differnt fingerings to help you make smooth transitions. Many of the songs are slow and fast tempo on the CD. I like the different tempos because it helps you to play with feeling at a slow and fast tempo(if you decide to use the tracks to help you develope your from the heart playing[this is what the blues is all about -right?]). This book should be used with "More Blues You Can Use" to get all John Ganapes wants to teach.
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