Learn Willie Reed's Dreaming Blues from John Miller Part 2/2

Learn Willie Reed's Dreaming Blues from John Miller Part 2/2 —is going to do walking down the fourth string chromatically; ring, middle index. [Demonstration] Now, it goes into the accompaniment of the second verse. He does a little rolled hammer from the middle finger to the ring and let the thumb drag on through. [Demonstration] Okay, now the trick is on those brush strokes to get the sound crisp, bounce the left hand, bounce that index finger bar and you’d only have to pick it all the way up but as soon as you stop depressing the string all together, it is going to cut off the backend of the notes, so you get that good clipped sound. [Demonstration] Yeah, then it goes. A7, once again slides up to D. Now, he goes into this thing. Back to that hammer into the E7 partial, drag the thumb through, walk down chromatically. Now, here’s his first solo and one thing cool about his solos on his song, they’re one quarters. He just stay in the A chord for the entire time and he is just kind of riffing out of A, so this solo, I will lead into it. [Demonstration] So, you can see when he is doing that ascending chromatic line, it’s all free handed until the point of which you strike that and down the third sting of the second fret, at that point you can drop your bar in. [Demonstration] So, that s the first solo and you can see it’s nothing like the entire length of the form. It’s more like a four or five bar solo. Now, the second solo is really kind of a thumb-a-thon, I mean he really goes to it with the thumb here in the right hand and once again, this one begins with two pickups, falling on four ends. So, if you are counting then you would go: [Demonstration] I'll do that again just a little bit slow down and the key to this, I mean obviously it’s a kind of thing you are going to have to practice a lot because the thumb is so independent here but you need that good coverage just holding that index bar in place, the middle finger gets third fret of whatever string, ring gets fourth fret of whatever string. [Demonstration] So, that’s the second break. Now the outro, he just hits a down beat and then he goes into a run and it’s a lot like the second break. Same sort of idea and so, if I am counting then it would be like this: [Demonstration] So, that’s Dreaming Blues and one thing I really urge you to do is listen to the recording a lot because as with many of the early players, the phrase lengths are not necessarily all four beat measures, you can count six beat measures and it’s not necessarily sticking strictly to a 12 bar form for that matter, so you need to internalize the vocal, the rhythms of these different breaks and so on but that is Dreaming Blues and so, we are going to have a pause here and then I am going to come back and play the entire piece at a slow tempo. [Demonstration]