About The Series

Quick Description

• 3 total lessons (Talk-through, Chords, 1 solo chorus)
• 10 minute previews for each
• In the style of Life Without You

About The Series

The first song I ever wrote in college was modeled after the Stevie Ray Vaughan song “Life Without You”.  It wasn’t a very complicated song, but very personal.  The song is based on a repeating chord progression, with several solo choruses.  Eventually I added words, but for the purposes of this series, I played it as an instrumental. The series was started by an amp demo that I posted to the site where I played this song.  The response was so overwhelming that I taught 3 lessons about the song.

Lesson Details

Talk-through Lesson

I tried out a new approach in this lesson, providing a play-by-play of the entire demonstration.  The details in this lesson will help you to pick apart the performance and see when I move from box to box, what kinds of things I’m doing to get the sound at each part, etc…

Free

• The first 10 minutes

Full Lesson (27 minutes)

• The full walk-through lesson

Chords Lesson

In this lesson I teach the main chord progression of the song.  While it’s based on some simple chords, adding some Hendrix-style flair really gives it a much fuller sound.

Learning to play chords this way helps to blur the lines between lead and rhythm playing.

Free

• The first 10 minutes of the lesson.

Full Lesson (31 minutes)

• Teaches all the chords and how to connect them.
• Instruction on how to use the Hendrix hammer-on techniques for making the chords sound fuller and fatter.

Solo Lesson

In this lesson I teach one chorus of the solo.  The portion that I teach borrows heavily from the song “Life Without You”.  By learning this portion of the solo, you’ll gain insight into how to play the solo from that song.

Free

• The first 10 minutes of the lesson.

Full Lesson (28 minutes)

• Teaches all the licks in one chorus of the solo.
• Talks about how to mmake your playing more “conversational” and expressive.
• Details on how to make the solo sound the way it does as you play.

Demonstration Video

This is the video that prompted the followup lesson series.  I was demonstrating my Fender Blues Junior Amplifier and my pedals.  People really reacted to the song positively, so I began planning some lessons to teach the song.

Purchasing Options

All the lessons in this series can be purchased as individual downloads or as a bundle in the Lesson Download Store

This series will soon be available on DVD in the DVD Store