Theory Behind His Styles
Number one the Key. Then is it major or minor? You learn the triads from major and minor scales studies.
Chris plays us the I III V of the scale but doesn't explain any of it and has a drummer and bass backing track.
He plays a lot of intervallic stuff on the high strings and melodies too jumping around our 5 octave centers.
He is underlining that with practice you become better and showing us his level of fluidity and neck viscosity.
Thank you, I think! Since he isn't explaining any of it such that we could glean an exercise out of it. He latter rectifies this somewhat.
Soon he starts adding color by using more notes than I III IV then we go on to the higher tensions by adding the 7th and the 9th ex-tensions.
The (flat) b7th, b9th and the raised +9th too can be very color full. Try to stay inside each of the chords when soloing. Minor Pentatonic scale is G is next. He plays it in patterns of notes 2, 3, 4, 5, etc up and down. He says to learn it starting on its different intervallic notes as many ways as you can. A la Modes as it were. It will give you more color.
That's a big part of guitar scales. Learning the major scale in the 5 different two octave patterns, then connecting the patterns. Takes time. This is like your big brother telling you how to go about teaching yourself to play so in that sense its quite good.
What he leaves out he makes up for in other ways which are good to know about. He likes Jeff Beck a lot too and can play the bejezzuss out that 'ole '63 Stratocaster. Which is like the best Strat year ever apparently. Even Joe Bonamassa has 2 '63 Strats.
Rhythm and Solos with intervals instead of single line notes but he has a drummer and bass player to back his noodling up in Bb. He lets loose and plays some really nice simply voiced I iv V shuffle blues for us that uses 9th chords and has quite a few move T-Bone himself might have used and that SRV feeling of Texas shuffle is evoked and all with chords. Next we change to the key of B and to learn some funk and soloing stuff off Chris' Texas Sugar release. There are some sweet I IV V moves a motivated guitarist with a few hours of practice under their belt could learn right here.
Moods Colors and Riffs is where he tries to express his dark feeling mood on the guitar. The minor i iv v in Bm. He plays a minor blues somewhere between My old Blue Jeans by ZZtop and Tin Pan Alley by SRV. This style you want to get tattooed into your psyche if its not too late.
I though he meant dark mood like Heavy Metal dark or Black Sabbath Dark! Have you heard 2013's Sabbath release "13"? Its a great record. Made album of the year too. It proves the English can still rock. Which oft-times I wonder about. Must be the water or over education but something has gone wrong in the UK as far as basic rock and roll. I am sure if lived there I would know better.
This lesson gets better and better for its last 5 minutes if you want to pull some really nice licks and chord movement which you will use over and over again. Then he goes out of the pentatonic and techniques around for us in various ways.
All this to avoid too much of just one style. Chris tells us that music is an unlimited landscape and that if we limit our horizons we are only limiting ourselves. How true! But still its more fun to know what you like and learn that first. I like a lot of what I heard here and if you combined that with say this Blues guitar lesson by Shun Kikuta you would have something cohesive to chew on. Shun is a little short on the explanations and heavy on the exercises while Chris is the just the opposite. The two go well together.
"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them." ― Aristotle