First gear is the foundation. It isn't everything you'll ever need to play the blues, but it's the part that makes everything after it possible, and it's the part that does the most for you fastest.

If playing over blues chord changes is still a bit of a mystery, I want to give you one lick that gets you through the entire 12-bar blues progression. I call it the nasty lick. And the reason I like it so much is that it solved the specific problem that had me stuck for years.

If you want to learn to play the blues, here's something that might surprise you. You don't need to learn all five minor pentatonic shapes. You don't need to learn one full shape. What you need is a single-octave minor pentatonic fragment, and that's genuinely it.

Ask almost any guitar player if they know the 12-bar blues and you'll get the same answer. Oh yeah, I learned that years ago. Then you ask them to play it. What happens more often than you'd think is that somewhere around two-thirds of the way through, it starts to fizzle. They lose their place. And you can see the moment it lands on them: huh, I thought I knew that better.

You put on a jam track, you start playing, and about four bars in you hear it. You are not playing the blues. You are running a scale. The notes are all correct, and none of it sounds like music. If you have been stuck there for a while, I want you to know it is not a sign that you started too late or that you are missing some talent gene. It happens to almost everyone, and it happens for a reason that has nothing to do with how hard you have been practicing. Where it Starts

I have played guitar for 34 years and taught it for 15. I have recorded hundreds of lessons. And until a couple of weeks ago, I had never taken a real singing lesson in my life. Not because I could not. Because I did not want to. If you play guitar and you have been quietly avoiding singing, you probably recognize at least one of my reasons.