Learn To Play Blues Guitar

Blues guitar music has established itself as a permanent part of our culture. It is basically an expression of feelings, and a few decades ago you might have had a hard time singing a blues song in an authentic way. The blues was a part of the culture of black people in America and was an expression of feelings unique to them and sung and played in a way that nobody else could imitate. But now that the blues is part of the fabric of modern music it has become second nature for white people in New York, London, Amsterdam or Sydney to express their own feelings using the black idiom.

So now we have established that you can sing the blues without anybody laughing or throwing vegetables, let us discuss how to begin. A good start would be to widen your knowledge of blues artists. Duane Allman springs to mind as a great blues guitarist who played with a number of great singers. If you can get hold of one of his anthologies where he plays guitar for artists other than The Allman Brothers you might be giving you knowledge of blues singing and playing a shot it in the arm. You could also take a listen to John Lee Hooker and Tony Joe White for a lesson in simplicity and economy of movement in guitar playing.

Now to start playing blues guitar. Start playing the E major chord in the first position on the guitar. Just strum using four downstrokes. Repeat that three more times, only the final time make the chord E7. Keep playing the even downstrokes in bunches of four and go onto an A7 chord for two bars and two bars back on the E major. The last four bars are one B7, one bar A7 and two bars E major.

So now we have the basic chords for the blues in the key of E. When you get sick of strumming chords you begin to look around for some kind interesting thing to play. What you need to look for now is “riffs” and “licks”. A riff is a musical phrase which is repeated or varied during a song. There are many famous riffs in modern guitar music. Iron Man by Black Sabbath or Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple are songs featuring distinctive riffs. A lick is a musical phrase that is like a jigsaw puzzle piece that fits with other licks to make a guitar solo. So when you are listening to blues guitar solos to find some material you can use, think of the solo as a set of licks rather than a stream of notes. Guitarists learn a collection of licks that they can repeat as they originally heard them or add notes or change notes to vary the lick. After some practice they can mix and vary their licks almost effortlessly to create a new solo every time they play a song.

Now you have the bare bones of what is needed in order to play blues guitar. There is plenty of material on the internet to help you gain more material and a deeper understanding of blues music. In fact there is so much free blues lessons out there that you need to take it easy and learn little bits at a time, especially when learning scales and licks for solos.

Here is some 12 bar blues music in a PDF file from Cattail Music and I also found a blues guitar lesson by Jim Burger on ActiveGuitar.com

Here is Duane Allman playing guitar for Wilson Pickett on Hey Jude: