Instructional Material
All Fred's books have tablature unless otherwise noted. Most have music notation too.
Blues Methods
Slide Guitar Wall Chart
Full size (35" by 24"), color & really attractive, w/info on D and G tunings: chords, scales, licks, recommended listening & general slide techniques.
- $8.99
Fretboard Roadmaps for Slide Guitar
Learn to improvise slide licks, solos, chord, and backup in several open tunings and standard tuning. First position and up the neck. Lots of tab, music, and recorded sample tunes. Works for blues, rock, country, acoustic and electric.
- Book & CD$14.95
Fretboard Roadmaps for Blues Guitar
The first in the "Roadmaps Series": learn 4 moveable blues boxes, 1st position licks and scales, chord-based licks, boogie patterns, turnarounds, lots of moveable patterns that the pros use to play in any key. Pleanty of written and recorded examples on CD. Plus, 5 practice tracks.
- Book & CD$14.95
Bottleneck/Slide Guitar DVD
70 minute lesson on electric & acoustic slide. Learn to jam in open G & D and standard tunings: solos, licks, backup & fills for Little Red Rooster, One Way Out, The Sky is Crying and more.
- DVD & book$29.95
Bottleneck/Slide Guitar CDs
CD #1: OPEN G TUNING - Simple chords, playing down the neck, fingerpickinghints, barred chords. Playing up the neck, G tuning scales & positions.Solos in the style of Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Fred McDowell.Tremolo & other slide techniques.
CD #2: OPEN D & E TUNING - Same approach as in 1st lesson, butin D & E tunings. Solos in styles of Tampa Red, Elmore James, DuaneAllman.
CD #3: STANDARD TUNING - Slide in E, a la Robert Nighthawk & MuddyWaters, more scales & positions for other keys, solos in the style of George Harrison, Ron Wood, other rock guitarists.
- 3 one hour-long CD's, $24.95 for the set, comes with complete tab/music book.$24.95
Beginner's Blues Guitar CDs
CD #1: SIMPLE BLUES IN E-Lots of sample tunes illustrate stylesof Lightning Hopkins, Big Bill Broonzy & John Lee Hooker. Simple chords& accompaniment, boogie bass lines, turnarounds & more.
CD #2: SIMPLE BLUES IN G & C - Chords & licks for these keys,Techniques of Mance Lipscomb, Mississippi John Hurt & Blind Blake. More boogie bass lines, answer-back licks & moveable chord fragments.
CD #3: PLAYING MELODY - Simple 1st position blues scales for soloing(finger- & flatpicking) in E, G & C. Many solos, choking the strings,etc.
- 3 one hour-long CD's, $24.95 for the set, comes with complete tab/music book.$24.95
Classic Blues Licks for Electric Guitar
130 licks based on four moveable blues boxes and first position, plus 20 chord/rhythm licks and 25 boogie figures. Inprove your soloing & backup; this is the vocabulary you need to speak the language of the blues.
- Book (CD tracks free online)$9.95
Learn to Play Bottleneck Guitar
A slide method for open (D, E, G & A) and standard tunings. Two dozen sample tunes & fretboard diagrams, scales & licks teach you the styles of the bottleneck masters. An easy-to-intermediate level do-it-yourself manual.
- Book & CD$17.95
Electric Blues Guitar DVD
80 minutes on soloing & backup, moveable blues boxes, scales & chord-basedlicks, note bending, vibrato, improvising...plus Stormy Monday, KillingFloor, Baby Please Don't Go & other blues classics.
- DVD & Book$29.95
Beginner's Blues Guitar DVD
Over an hour of picking & strumming songs like Keys To The Highway & How Long Blues. Fred starts at the beginning. Boogie basslines, turnarounds, picking patterns.
- book & CD$29.95
Electric Blues Rock Guitar, The 1930s, 40s and 50s
LESSON ONE: BEGINNINGS - THE ROOTS OF ELECTRIC BLUES - Electric blues stylists grew out of the guitar picking of versatile single-string soloists like Lonnie Johnson and Scrapper Blackwell and the country bluesmen, turned electric, like Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker. Fred slows down and analyzes the licks, scales and techniques of these players.
LESSON TWO: ELECTRIC SLIDE GUITAR - Using several sample tunes, Fred teaches how to play electric slide guitar in the styles of the blues masters, the players who inspired Johnny Winter, The Allman Brothers, Ron Wood and the rest of today’s rock slide guitarists. Learn the techniques of Tampa Red (open D), Muddy Waters (open G), Elmore James (open E) and Robert Nighthawk (standard tuning) and how to apply these techniques to rock progressions.
LESSON THREE: EARLY BLUES/ROCK: CHUCK BERRY and BO DIDDLEY - These two guitarists defined rock guitar in their day. The licks and styles they used, derived from blues players, are still an important part of every rock guitarist’s repertoire.
- 3 one-hour CD "audio lessons" w/Book$24.95
Electric Blues Rock Guitar, The 1960s and 70s
LESSON ONE: KING OF MODERN BLUES: B.B.KING, ALBERT KING, FREDDIE KING and T.BONE WALKER - By analyzing sample tunes, Fred teaches how to play electric single-string blues licks. You will learn several scale positions and how to improvise with them, how to do the “blues vibrato”, how to do fill-in licks, chords and turn arounds.
LESSON TWO: MODERN ROCK: ENGLISH BLUES and HEAVY METAL - This lesson concentrates on the licks, scales and playing styles of Eric Clapton, Van Halen, Ted Nugent and Jimmy Page – guitarists whose playing directly derives from the blues masters. It includes instruction in effects (distortion, vibrato bar, etc.), blues and sliding scales.
LESSON THREE: JAZZY ELECTRIC BLUES - How to jazz up the 12-bar blues progression, how to vary the blues scales with diminished scales á la Charlie Christian, how to apply blues scales to jazz tunes, how to “substitute scales” and the special techniques used by Wes Montgomery and George Benson
- 3 one-hour CD "audio lessons" w/Book$24.95
Basic Blues for Guitar
The most thorough blues guitar book yet, covers electric & rock blues,folk & fingerpicking blues, BB King & Chuck Berry styles, jazzy blues, bottleneck & more...positions & scales, chords, theory, discographies.Everything from Robert Johnson to George Benson! Over 35 blues tunes written in music & tab & chord grids, all played on the recording. Rhythm & lead written out separately.
- book & CD$19.95
Blues Transcriptions
Dunlop Slide Guitar Book
History & method for slide guitar, including transcriptions of blues, rock & country giants like Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Muddy, Duane Allman, Mick Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, David Lindley, George Harrison.
- Book$9.95
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ligntnin' Blues
25 tunes including Love Struck Baby, Pride & Joy, Texas Flood, Scuttle Buttin', Say What, Look At Little Sister. Transcribed by John Tapella.
- $24.95
Howlin' Wolf
13 hits, the playing of Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, Willie Johnson: Goin' Down Slow, Fourty Four, Smokestack Lightning, Killing Floor, Sitting On Top of the World, more.
- $19.95
Electric Blues Guitar Giants
Solos by Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Albert King, Lowell Fulson, Duane Allman, Mike Bloomfield, Hendrix, B.B., Hubert Sumlin, Elmore James & more: Double Trouble, Killing Floor, One Way Out, Dust My Broom etc.
- $18.95
John Lee Hooker, Blues Legend
20 tunes, open & standard tunings: Blues Before Sunrise, Boom Boom Boom, Stella Mae, Louise, Dimples, One Scotch One Bourbon and more.
- $19.95
Muddy Waters
30 tunes: Honey Bee, Hoochie Coochie Man, Rollin' & Tumblin', all the classics. Standard & open G tuning. Sidemen Jimmy Rogers & others also transcribed.
- Book & CD$24.95
Roots of Slide Guitar
6 pivotal slide tunes with the licks, styles, and techniques behind them. Including history and bios of bottleneck pioneers. Standard and open tunings: Robert Johnson, Willie Newbern, Fred Mcdowell, Earl Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Mance Lipscomb.
- Book & CD$16.95
Roots of Electric Blues Guitar
6 pivotal blues classics and the licks, styles, and techniques behind them. Including history and bios of electric blues pioneers. Freddy King (Hideaway), Hubert Sumlin (Killing Floor), T-Bone Walker (Mean Old World), Guitar Slim, B.B. King, Otis Rush and more.
- Book & CD$16.95
Blues Arrangements
Great Blues Solos
The twenty fingerpicked acoustic solos in this 5 ½" by 8" book/CD were inspired by the great "first generation" acoustic blues guitarists: Huddie Ledbetter, Mance Lipscomb, Skip James, Gary Davis, Jesse Fuller, Blind Blake, and others. Several of the songs are in alternate tunings and some are in bottleneck style.
- Book & CD$7.95
Blues Ukulele
16 blues standards. Each song has two arrangements: One with lyrics, melody and uke chord grids to strum while singing, and one with a chord/melody tab arrangement, so you can play the song instrumentally, with lots of blues licks thrown in. All songs are played & sung on the CD. Includes: Beale Street Blues, C. C. Rider, Limehouse Blues, Midnight Special, St. James Infirmary, St. Louis Blues, Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness, If I Do & 9 others. Guitar players: if you play guitar, you can play ukulele! You use the same chord shapes, they just have different names.
- Book & CD$24.95