Archive for: June 2008

If you love listening to blues guitar playing you will probably have a thirst for knowledge of the blues guitarists who turned blues music into a language spoken, played and sung worldwide. You can find the arrangements and compositions of many blues players in guitar tabulature, and if you do your daily practice, you will soon be able to play songs by people like Robert Johnson, B.B. King and Eric Clapton.

Looking on the internet for blues guitar tablature will give you quite a variety of lessons in blues guitar besides tab for traditional blues music by singers, guitarists and composers of the early twentieth century. I should say that alot of songs cannot be traced back to their origins but nonetheless they have been popular songs since the beginning of the blues. So it is time to get aquainted with some of the blues guitarists who helped make the blues what it is today.

You need to listen to the artists of the past in order to find a direction for yourself as a blues guitar player. You need to know the meaning of a few terms in order to know what you are listening to when you start to explore early blues music.

So I will outline a couple of common words you will come across in blues lessons. Groups of notes which are utilised in guitar solos are called “licks”. They might be scales or arpeggios but all blues guitar players have a stash of licks that they can throw into a guitar solo or use to begin a new improvisation. You also need to know about riffs. A riff is a repeated pattern of notes which appears throughout a song. Riffs were used alot in the ’60’s and if somebody says, “Smoke On The Water” and you can immediately hear a guitar in your head, you know what a riff is.

Mississippi John Hurt was a blues pioneer who came to fame as an elderly man playing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. With his guitar playing and singing as good as ever he spent the 1960’s recording traditional blues songs. But he made many blues records in his youth and the sessions from the 1920’s brought us blues standards like “Frankie And Johnny” and “Stagger Lee”.

Robert Johnson was born in 1911 and was an extremely talented guitarist, singer and song writer. We do not know a whole lot about him apart from the legend of his meeting with the Devil. Apparently Johnson’s success as a blues artist was due to the fact that he swapped his soul for mastery of the blues guitar. Johnson’s prime was in the 1920’s and 1930’s but he did not achieve wide reaching acclaim till the 1960’s. He delivered his soul to the Devil in 1938 at the age of twenty-seven.

And then there was Leadbelly. Huddie Ledbetter was born in 1888 and is strongly associated with the twelve-string guitar which he played like an angel. The rest of his life was far from angelic consisting of romping with numerous women, drinking copious amounts of alcohol and killing a person or two. His virtuosity on the twelve string guitar inspired Pete Seeger to popularize the instrument in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

You may already have some idea about whether you want to play acoustic or electric blues. The three blues guitar players I have mentioned were all acoustic guitarists, partly due to electric guitars being unavailable to them in their heyday. But to many people blues guitar music is synonymous with the electric guitar. B.B. King, Eric Clapton and Roy Buchanan were, in their individual approaches to the blues, pioneers of electric blues music.

In closing, a YouTube guitar video of Jimi Hendrix playing acoustic blues.

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The II-V-I chord progression is used in many musical genres but is considered to be extremely important in Jazz. It is a good idea for a guitarist aiming at having a total understanding of the guitar to develop a collection of licks to play over this progression. I have found a link to a free video lesson on the II-V-I progression. This is part of a collection of ten free guitar lessons launched as an introduction to the new Infinite Guitar website.

Technorati Tags: II-V-I chord progression, free guitar lessons

This little essay on how to play bass guitar is aimed at the guitar player who needs to enter some kind of witness protection program but still maintain a tenuous connection with the world of music. This has proven to be a great way to keep your anonymity while staying in the public eye. The bass guitar player in a rock band maintains the rhythm of the song while the lead guitarist is checking out the chicks in the audience, and the drummer is recalling what decade he is in. To change to this subservient but useful role in a musical group requires a little understanding of the difference between a bass guitar and a real guitar together with some idea of bass guitar playing technique.

Theoretically any guitar player can switch from lead to bass although only one guitarist of note - Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake And Palmer - made a career out of it. It was rumored that he thought it would be a good way to stop attracting women. Actually he constantly switched between lead and bass while maintaining his position as lead singer. Clearly a guy with issues.

Anyway let us get onto the main features of a bass guitar. The standard tuning of a four string bass guitar is E A D G. The tunings are similar on the five string bass except for a low B string, and on a six string except for a high C string. So on a 6 string bass the tuning is B E A D G C. There are also seven string basses with a high F string.
There are several ways you can tune a bass guitar but as they are the same as those used to tune a regular guitar, I will not mention them. As with other guitars you tune the bass guitar by loosening the string and tuning up to the note you are aiming for. Tune each string separately being careful to match the sound of the string to your bass guitar tuner. While we are on the subject of tuning, be sure to do a search for a free online bass guitar tuner.

On the electric bass guitar, the music is made by plucking with the index and middle fingers or with a pick. Early Fender basses had a “thumbrest” attached to the pickguard, below the strings. This was to rest the fingers while the thumb plucked the strings. The common perception is that the pick is used by rock bass players but players of all styles have their own individual techniques, sometimes using thumb, fingers or pick according to the sound they want. The guitar can sound different if all upstrokes, all downstrokes or alternating strokes of the pick are employed.

Some bass players such as Les Claypool and John Entwistle played using their fingernails similar to a classical acoustic guitarist. There is controversy among musical historians over whether bass guitarists who pluck with their fingers are innovators who have explored new horizons or they simply were not told about plectrums.

Playing the bass guitar needs a certain amount of speed and dexterity, and bass guitar music will demand that you develop your own style. For inspiration listen to the most popular and influential bass players of past generations such as Paul McCartney, Pino Palladino - the replacement bass player for John Entwistle in The Who, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jaco Pastorius - called by many musicians the most innovative bass player ever, Mark King - a very fast English bass player, and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin.

In the meantime, here is a music video clip from Google on how to play a C major scale on bass guitar:

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