Mark Dziuba's Serious Blues: Expanding Grooves: Guitar Book & DVD

Dziuba moves well beyond basic 12-bar patterns and shuffle feels. His systematic exploration of rhythmic feels (12/8, straight rhythms, Latin montuno, Charleston) alongside advanced harmonic voicings and practical techniques like sliding into chords and open-string drones creates a pathway from intermediate comfort to genuine stylistic fluency. The DVD demonstrations anchor abstract concepts in real finger positions and sonic results.

Working through these pages, you'll notice the blues opening into unexpected textures. Straight feels alongside shuffles, triplet-based grooves, and borrowed rhythmic ideas from Latin and swing traditions reshape how you hear the fundamental 12-bar form. Each new technique builds tangible control over your rhythmic and harmonic voice within the blues tradition.

This book serves intermediate guitarists who have basic blues knowledge and are ready to move beyond standard shuffle grooves into sophisticated rhythmic and harmonic territory. Players working toward fluency in multiple blues styles, or guitarists preparing to teach blues concepts at an intermediate level, will find systematic guidance here.

• Lock the straight versus shuffle distinction into your muscle memory by practicing transitions between them at tempo, using the DVD demonstrations to calibrate your feel against Dziuba's touch.
• Build chord fills deliberately into your comping vocabulary rather than relegating them to occasional flourishes; isolate each example and apply it over a full chorus before moving to the next technique.
• Experiment with accent and mute combinations over one chord progression before expanding to full blues forms; the contrast between muted and open strokes transforms rhythmic texture in ways that transcend what standard picking alone can achieve.
• Approach the Latin montuno rhythms as compositional building blocks for your own blues interpretations, not ornaments; internalize the pattern on one chord first, then transpose across the ii-V-I progression.

Assign this as a student resource for guitarists working on ensemble comping skills or preparing for jazz performance opportunities where stylistic versatility matters. It also serves well as a reference for directors building comprehensive blues curriculum across mixed instrumental groups.

• Distinguishing and executing shuffle versus straight rhythmic feels
• Playing in 12/8 and other non-standard blues feels
• Using triplet-based rhythms and syncopation within blues contexts
• Applying chord fills and extensions within blues forms
• Executing mute and accent techniques for rhythmic articulation
• Sliding into chords and using open-string drones
• Voicing complex chord extensions and upper-structure harmony
• Interpreting rhythmic patterns from Latin and swing traditions within blues frameworks