*All The Things You Are Lesson Review   -- 99 Cent Guitar Lessons (www.99centgutiarlessons.com) is a fantastic resource for everyone from the beginning to the advanced guitarist in all styles of music.  This is the video lesson site for Rich Severson’s Guitar College program.  There you’ll find lessons from comping and finger picking to full song arrangements chord melody and solo guitar style.  You’ll find everything from country, rock, classical, blues and jazz guitar lessons.  One lesson that stands out to me in particular is Rich’s All The Things You Are (ATTYA) lesson.  Rich offers several lessons for this tune depending on your skill and area of need. 

Offering several smaller lessons on a topic or tune helps keeps the cost of the lessons down.  This way if you only need some improvisation tips, you don’t have to pay for a big lesson that includes comping or chord melody.  However, the lessons are so comprehensive that you may just want them all.  For ATTYA there are six lessons available.  Each one covers a different issue with playing this jazz standard.  The comping lesson demonstrates Rich’s chord playing over the tune and then provides a pdf file of the chords plus a video of Rich explaining his approach.  Rich’s chordal work is great.  He creates nice melodic voice leading between chords.  You get to hear how a master player approaches the rhythm for this tune.

The chord melody is similar.  Rich walks you through his arrangement of this tune (again with pdf and video explanation).  You’ll walk away with a great sounding chord melody that isn’t too hard to play either. 

For the improvisations lessons you have an explanation of how to solo over this tune, like what scales and arpeggios will work for your solo, all demonstrated on video and pdf files.  The arpeggio study lesson is invaluable for those wanting to learn how to voice-lead melodic ideas over jazz changes.  These are things that a jazz saxophone or piano player can do in their sleep, but as guitarists, we don’t often have a handle on playing through chord changes with arpeggios.  Rich’s pdf file and video will walk you through all of that.  The last two videos for the ATTYA lesson series are actual solos of Rich playing over the chord changes.  You will learn two complete solos full of great improvisation ideas and lines that will definitely impress your audience.  You can also download 4 different rhythm tracks to jam along with (at various tempos and styles from swing to bossa).  Not only do you get great ideas and material in these lessons, but throughout all of these videos, you are sitting down with Rich one-on-one as he explains everything note for note in his relaxed teaching style.  I can’t think of a better way to learn All The Things You Are than to take a lesson from Rich Severson.  But if you can’t take a lesson personally, the video lessons he has at 99 cent guitar lessons are the next best thing.  Don’t just take my word for it, check them out for yourself.   --Reviewed by Eric Elias