Truefire Josh Smith’s Practice Sessions: Blue Highways Soloing TUTORIAL
8 Soloing and Improvisation Techniques for Blues Guitarists
Josh Smith covered a wide variety of key approaches and techniques in his highly acclaimed Blue Highways Masterclass. Throughout the masterclass, Josh stressed the importance of the “head, the hand, and the heart” as the building blocks for honing your skill as an improviser.
In this hands-on course, you’ll take your soloing and improvisational skills to the next level by digging deeper with Josh on 8 of his own most impactful approaches.
”We’ll start out with a practice session for getting double stop licks under your fingers. Triplet patterns are a huge part of my soloing, so we’ll dig into those in the second session.
The third session focuses on expressive bending licks. Hybrid picking is next and then we’ll look at another one of my favorites, sliding licks.
We’ll work on chromaticism — the simplest way to start building connections between licks and chords. The seventh session focuses on repetitive licks, which are crucial in creating a theme in your solos and giving the listener something to latch on to.
And finally we’ll work on open string lines, another great way to add color to your improvisation and make your story really unique.”
What makes this format really special is how you’ll get these approaches firmly under your fingers — you’ll practice each of the concepts together with Josh, in a series of interactive practice sessions.
Josh will kick off each study with a breakdown of the key concept, technique, or underlying approach and then he’ll perform the approach over a backing track to give you a feel for how it sits in the rhythm section.
You’ll cap off each soloing study together with a hands-on practice session. Josh will roll the track and you’ll trade back and forth as he guides you through the core examples followed by several variations and embellishments.
Working regularly with these “practice sessions” is the key to having command of all 8 soloing and improvisational approaches.
You’ll get standard notation and tabs for all of the performance studies. Plus, you’ll be able to use TrueFire’s learning tools to sync the tab and notation to the video lesson. You can also loop or slow down the videos so that you can work with the lessons at your own pace. All of the backing tracks are included to work with on your own as well.
Grab your guitar and let’s dig in with Josh Smith!