For most of my 18 years teaching online, I've focused on the styles of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King, and Jimi Hendrix. And I will never apologize for that.

But as YouTube and Instagram became more popular, I noticed a trend among young guitar players.

A lot of young blues guitarists find Stevie Ray Vaughan and latch onto the aggressive, "gunslinger" aspect of his playing. They master that heavy minor pentatonic sound, and they play everything with lots of intensity. But that sound, which I call "minor pentatonic purgatory," is very one-dimensional, and it's a telltale sign of someone who spent lots of time studying a few SRV songs, but not much else.

They miss the parts of Stevie's playing that were influenced by B.B. King, so they sound even less interesting than Stevie did, because they only learned his intensity, but not his restraint.

That's why I think every young blues guitar player, especially those interested in SRV, should take time out to study B.B. King directly.

B.B. King's sound was rooted in the major pentatonic, and he leaned on that sound in almost every song he played. And it's important for young players to realize that his sound is just as

Learning B.B.'s style will balance your playing out and help you escape from the one-dimensional sound that so many players who learn from SRV end up trapped in.

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