Blues, Rock, and Jazz Guitar

The road to becoming a well-rounded and expressive guitarist begins with mastering the basics. This three-course guitar certificate program provides students with an excellent background in three keystone styles: Blues, Rock and Jazz.

You’ll start the program by learning the techniques and licks of classic blues stylists, such as T-Bone Walker, Lightning Hopkins, B.B. King, and Magic Sam in the Blues Guitar Workshop course. You'll build a foundation in form, control, and harmony, and learn to add more depth and feel to any other style of music. The program moves on to study the styles of the classic rock giants, including Hendrix, Page, Clapton, Duane Allman, and David Gilmour in Classic Rock Guitar Workshop. By analyzing these player's signature works, you'll learn methods of improvisation, phrasing, and sound conception that are essential to the classic rock guitar technique. The last course in the program, Jazz Guitar, covers the basics behind the jazz language: chord/scale usage, building melodic tension, and improvisation techniques in our Jazz Guitar course. Through the use of transcriptions and slowed-down examples, you'll study the styles of some of the most influential jazz guitarists over the past 50 years (including Grant Green, Wes Montgomery, John Scofield, Mike Stern, and Pat Martino), and learn to infuse these techniques into your playing as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

By the end of this program, you’ll have learned an array of Blues, Rock, and Jazz chords, scales, phrasings, and improvisational techniques that will set the groundwork for whatever style of music you want to play, as well as make you a more comfortable player in many different live settings.