The folks over at Truefire released a new course from Andy Timmons called Electric Expression. I started going over the lessons last night and thought I’d write this review so you can all learn more about what he teaches.
Firstly, I’m a big Andy Timmons fan – I was introduced to his playing via his earlier Truefire lessons. So I was excited when I saw that he had a new course that’s recently been released.
There are two main sections to this course:
- Essential Concepts
- Performance Studies
I’m working through the Essential Concepts part of the course and I’ve had a quick look at a couple of the Performance Studies Videos.
Here’s the video overview of the course.
This video on Tension and Release is part of the first section. It comes after a previous video that is called ‘Eliminating Blind Spots’ where he looks at playing scales up and down the neck on one string, rather than going across the strings but staying in the one zone on the fretboard. This is not new to me, but it’s not something I’ve worked on for a while and listening to him playing inspired me to spend more time on it. He then follows it up with the lesson shown below.
In this first section, he focuses on a song and each lesson builds off the previous one.
I spent a while on the Arpeggios and Triads video that’s shown below. I’ve never been great at playing arpeggios and triads in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m playing arpeggios and triads (hope that makes sense!!). I enjoyed this lesson because it’s helped me become more confident in playing arpeggios and has given me some patterns and ideas to use in my playing.
The Electric Gypsy video comes from the Performance part of the video where he focuses on five songs (six parts) and talks us through his approach to those songs. There’s enough here to keep me busy for a month.
When I work through a series like this, learning how to play the lines is only the first part. The next thing I’m interested in is becoming confident in playing these lines so I can incorporate them into my own style and adapt them to my playing.
Here’s another video on A Night To Remember, another of Andy’s songs. It’s great how he takes the time to explain why he plays certain things. That’s what makes this course so good – it’s not just about ‘play this’, but instead it shows you why he chooses to play the notes / style he’s playing.
And don’t get me started on how good his guitar sounds. In fact, that’s the one thing that’s missing from this course. Some courses have a final video where the instructor talks through the gear they’ve used on the session. This one lacks that. That’s the only thing I can fault.
I reckon this is a great course. It’s not for beginners – it’s more advanced players who are looking to get out of a playing rut and learn some new ideas. It’ll take a while to go through properly, but it’s worth it.
Click here for a preview of the course (and to see a few more videos).