Blues You Can Use by John Ganapes, so far would be my favorite learn to play Blues book, and I have a few of them.
Blues You Can Use by John Ganapes
Blues You Can Use starts out like most learn to play guitar books, with the basics at the start and gradually progresses into more advanced lessons. The goal of the book is to take a beginner to an advanced level of Blues based guitar.
The book comes with an audio CD filled with all of the play along exercises you will find in the book, but the thing that I like most about the CD, is it only contains the main exercise (guitar solo) at the end of each lesson, which is a full and useable guitar solo, not a recording of John playing scales, arpeggios or chords.
Each of the 21 lessons start out with some theory, and are divided into three parts, scales, chords and the final exercise, which always incorporates some of the theory learned. The lessons are designed so that you can play over the entire fret board in all keys.
It is an easy book to follow along with, the format is the standard 9″ x 12″ so it’s a good sized book that is easy to read.
The studies (guitar solos) are written in both music notation and tablature, as well as lots of easy to read and understand scale and chord diagrams within each of the 21 lessons.
All in all, Blues You Can Use by John Ganapes is a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to start out playing blues guitar. The reason I found this book so helpful is because each chapter has a full solo, and not bits and pieces of solos, so it was really easy to get started playing blues guitar.
Some other lick library books are not as user friendly as Blues You Can Use by John Ganapes in my opinion.