Shredding the Blues: Guitar Book & DVD

Martone's approach respects the blues as a genuine musical foundation rather than treating technique as separate from musicality. The pairing of heavy metal shred vocabulary with blues vocabulary forces students to think about emotional expression even when executing demanding passages, which is rare in shred-focused materials.

The energy is direct and unadorned, focused on the intersection where blues grit meets metal precision. Licks have teeth; they demand focus and clean execution, but the underlying material roots everything in recognizable blues vocabulary.

Intermediate guitarists with some blues and rock foundation who want to expand their technical toolkit and understand how shred techniques can serve musical expression rather than replace it. Players seeking structured practice on specific picking and fingering approaches will find the notation, TAB, and visual instruction particularly valuable.

• Isolate each technique (sweep picking, tapping, hybrid picking, string skipping) in slow sections first, then apply it to the licks as speed increases. Rushing integration leads to sloppy execution.
• Watch the DVD demonstrations closely for hand position and muting technique; the visual component is where much of the instruction lives.
• Study the neck diagrams alongside the standard notation and TAB. Cross-referencing these three representations builds stronger fretboard geography than relying on TAB alone.
• Record yourself playing the licks and listen back for phrasing and dynamics, not just note accuracy. Blues shredding depends on how you attack and release notes.

This works well as a supplemental resource for intermediate guitarists in a lesson studio or group setting, especially those preparing for rock or metal contexts. It's also effective for students who've mastered basic blues vocabulary and want to develop speed and technical complexity without abandoning the genre's emotional core.

• Sweep picking across multiple strings
• Tapping and two-handed techniques
• Hybrid picking (pick and fingers working together)
• String skipping for intervallic precision
• Blues scale application across the fretboard
• Reading standard notation and TAB in coordination
• Phrasing and dynamics in high-speed passages