The program is part of a set of guitar instructional CDs. This program is highly recommended for anyone interested in learning to play blues guitar. eMedia integrates in all of its products, audio tracks of featured recordings, graphic fret board fingering, options to view sheet music (with normal musical notation) and tablature (an easy to understand graphic way of showing notes on the fret board strings), and playing tips. Additionally, each CD comes with a tuner so you can tune your guitar, and a metronome. Included are ten blues selections considered classics -- ranging from B.B. King's The Thrill is Gone, to Boogie Chillen by John Lee Hooker, and Howlin' Wolf's Back Door Man.

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As a lifelong guitar player, primarily folk and country licks, I found this one of the easiest and fastest methods for learning anything. I grew up in the days when you played along with a record and tried to figure out the figuring. It took weeks, sometimes, to pull a song and get it close to the original. But with this system you play it through at slow speed, get a sense of the flow of the music, and then as you get more proficient you can increase the playing speed.
The fully animated fret board is clearly the best feature of this program. While a piece is playing on the audio track you can watch, in real time, the notes played visually on the graphic fret board. By slowing down the playback speed you can work on small sections, one note at a time, playing along with the program, until you can put it all together. The sheet music shows you numbered fret positions in the tablature, but the graphic fret board actually plays them.

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One mildly irritating problem with the program is that you cannot print out the tablature and music from the CD. So, unless you have your computer running, you have problems practicing. The program won't print straight from your system, which would enable you to print out a few bars to practice on away from the computer. The reason for the printing block is concern over copyright infringement.
There is an easy workaround for PC users (you Mac folks probably know an equivalent). Once a piece of music is up on the monitor, just hold down the ALT and Print Scrn keys simultaneously. That copies whatever's in the active window of your computer to the clipboard. Then open Microsoft Word. With the blinking cursor ready to enter text move your mouse pointer to the Edit menu. Click on it, and then click on "Paste" on the drop down Edit menu. That will slap the graphic right into the Word document where the cursor was positioned. If you want to copy a whole song you'll have to do this page by page, pasting the additional pages one after another. The resulting file will be pretty good size, because you are creating a document full of pictures.
eMedia's product line includes several guitar offerings from beginner to various advanced styles of which blues is one. They all feature the same, strong, graphic interface that uses the computer as a superior guitar teacher. If you want to play guitar, and if you want to learn one of the specializations in the product line, there's really no better approach. One thing you don't get with the program is the discipline to practice. Guitar, like anything else worth doing, takes some work. But this program takes the clutter out of learning and allows you to focus on the technique exactly as the masters do it.

Available from www.emediamusic.com $29.95
eMedia Music Corp.
664 NE Northlake Way
Seattle, WA 98105
www.emediamusic.com