Filisko Songs in Special Study Categories

Some of the Filisko songs, which are organized by skill level, may also be in one or more other categories. 

We can learn a lot from the best of the best.  These artist studies are the result of years of my own studies into the best players ever.  Important player's styles I have studied, replicated, and been influenced by, include the two Walter’s, the three Sonny’s, DeFord Bailey, Johnny Woods, and numerous others. I have created numerous complete instrumentals; often one-hundred percent in the style of a famous player. This includes players like Sonny Boy 1 and Rice Miller who didn’t record any instrumentals, and Sonny Terry who recorded almost nothing that was a shuffle groove instrumental. (For example, the Filisko song "Sonny's Shuffle.")

You may ask, “Why learn these instrumentals when I can just learn the instrumentals the real guys recorded?” Fair question! My experience has revealed that even if you were able to figure out and learn the melodic line in these songs, you likely won’t likely be able to figure out the other 4 layers of sound that really give these players their individual unique “special sauce.”

These are songs that predominantly use notes and sounds from the 6-note blues scale.  My approach for teaching the blues scale is novel and I don't believe that it is taught this way anywhere else. Knowing how to stick to the notes of the blues scale increases your ability to get a deep, dark, greasy, smoky, low-down blues sound.

These are songs that have a catchy melody that is repeated many times in slightly different ways throughout the song.  Being able to play a melody along with numerous variations of it is a powerful blues playing skill.   

These are NOT 12 bars long.  They include some 8-bar, a 9-bar, 16-bar, and some 1-bar (one chord) studies.  The 12-bar form is so extremely common that it is nice to have instrumentals that are outside of this common form.

Being able to play positions, playing in other keys on the same harmonica, is a fairly standard requirement for the blues harp player.  Most players use just 1st, 2nd, and 3rd position.  I have created some unusual instrumentals that focus on rarer positions, like 4th, 5th, and 6th, which are seldom heard in traditional blues, but have a value for minor blues, and also 12th position.  3rd position is often thought of as minor, but here I do have two instrumentals for minor blues ("Minor-Third Shuffle" and "3pm Rumba")  and another for standard blues ("3-P Blues").  There are two blues song studies for 1st position ("First Straight Shuffle" and "1-P Blues").  Both utilize the entire 10-hole range of the harmonica which is unusual because of how seldom the middle range is ever used in this position when playing Chicago Blues.

These are instrumentals that have a highly recognizable, repeating riff that shapes the personality of the song.  These riffs include the boogie, box shuffle, rumba, tramp, and others. 

Urban (city) blues tended to be amplified while rural blues styles, without as many options to develop with the availability of electricity, tended to use more chords and splits to allow for a bigger sound.  “DeFord's Dream” is a perfect study for this in 2nd position, and "Skip to My Lou" is the perfect study for this in 1st position.   

These are the songs that are NOT shuffles or swings.  They are all straight eighth-note grooves like the rumba, hambone, tramp, cha cha cha, old time, jungle and boogaloo. Blues music sometimes gets a bad reputation for having too many slow shuffles which is why playing other grooves is beneficial.