George Benson
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George Benson is one of the most respected guitarists in the world having successfully blended the extremely technical and expressive jazz guitar with perfect pop songs and beautiful melodies! In this course we introduce our new online tutor, Dion, as he takes you through everything you need to know to be able to play like George Benson. During this course we focus on both George's solo and rhythm playing, including octave parts, chromatic ideas, cool jazzy scales and a tonne of extension chords! As always we apply every bit of theory we look at with full solos and songs to learn to ensure you can apply all of these new ideas to your own playing.
We kick off our George Benson player study with a super cool 80's vibe track! George is famous for bringing his incredible jazz vocabulary to awesome pop records.
As you will have seen from the first solo study, George has a lot of go to ideas! In this section will will be looking through the octaves, double stops, economy picking, semi-tone slides and chromatic ideas that he uses in his playing.
To play jazz at the level Mr Benson does you need to have a firm grasp of theory and chord construction. In this section Dion will be breaking down a typical Benson jazz progression to get you mastering the rhythm side of his playing as well as the lead.
Following on from the rhythm section we will now take that 4 chord jazz piece and learn how to solo over it in a George Benson style. This is all about timing, targeting chord tones and vocal phrasing.
Chris takes you through all the guitars, amps and pedals we used to get an accurate George Benson tone. With George we would say that 99% of the tone is in the fingers and playing skill, especially as he doesn't use a single pedal!