Last year I discovered a lesson on how to play Blind Willie Johnson’s “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”, and Mitch of Blah148 and Ploddings. Not only was the lesson straight-forward, teaching you the basics of the song, the lesson went deeper, showing you how to actually play the notes and get the feeling.

And so my journey started. When I discovered that Mitch was developing a collection of Robert Johnson lessons, I was very excited. When the lesson pack came out I was probably one of the first one to buy it.

The lesson songs are grouped together based on their structure. Many of Robert Johnson’s songs have very similar structures, and as such if you learn the structure of one song, with a few tweaks of note changes, you can easily learn the songs’ brothers and sisters quite quickly and easily. I found this approach was different from other lessons on the net; different in that it hasn’t been approached this way before, which is odd as it seems much more intuitive.

The site promises that you can learn it all in 2 weeks, and if i didn’t have a full time job, two kids, a wife, and 2 cats I might have been able to learn them all in that timeline, but it did take me about a month. As such, it is quite amazing. By grouping the songs into families, it did make the whole process much, much quicker. And despite being burdened with responsiblitles, I learned more songs in a month than I learned in a year.

I would highly recommend this lesson set, and would also highly recommend past and futures lessons from Mitch at Ploddings.