Category: 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:

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If you can find free guitar tabs of the great blues guitar players on the internet, they will be a great help to you in your journey towards being a blues guitarist yourself.

An great way you can learn to play blues guitar is to listen to the work of the pioneer blues musicians and learn their material. The music you will be learning will be made up of riffs and licks you can adapt for your own original way of playing your music. The
feeling that listening to the great blues guitar players generates is unique to them, and hopefully you will be able to communicate to your own audiences on an emotional level.

It is time to mention briefly some of the techniques you will employ when you are learning to play blues guitar. Of course, no one technique is exclusive to any particular genre, but the ones I list here will be your means of communicating your own feeling of the blues. There are a techniques for playing notes without picking the string with the plectrum or your right hand fingers. First, String Bending which means bending the guitar string with the fingers of your left hand to alter the note you are playing up or down. Or you can press on the string, pluck the note and Slide it up or down. If you pick a note at the first fret and remove your finger with a pulling action it will sound the note you just played followed by the sound of the open string. This is called a pull-off.
Likewise you can pluck a note and while holding it with the first finger, slam the second finger down on the next fret. That is a hammer-on.

These techniques are much easier to do than they are to talk about, so make use of on-line videos to watch guitarists and you will gradually be able to recognize these techniques. You will also be able to see when blues guitarists play single-note scale
passages and when they prefer to use arpeggios, but that will take some practice at listening.

An obvious choice to look for is Eric Clapton, one of the greatest guitar players ever. His music has always been based in the blues even though he has successfully played rock, reggae and ballads. Standouts among many great songs include After Midnight, Hide Away, Bad Love, Badge, Before You Accuse Me (Take A Look At Yourself), Cocaine, Cross Road Blues (Crossroads), Forever Man, Hard Times, Have You Ever Loved A Woman, I Ain’t Got You, I Can’t Stand It, I Feel Free, I Shot The Sheriff, Lay Down Sally, Layla, Let It Grow, Strange Brew, Sunshine Of Your Love, Tulsa Time, White Room and Wonderful Tonight.

B.B. King is a blues legend who you should seek out in videos and in tab collections. He always records and performs with first class musicians who are at the top of their form. His songs have that spark of spontaneity as if he was making up the words and music as he goes along but there is never a hesitation over a lyric and never a note out of place. Songs include Beautician Blues, Five Long Years, Just like a Woman, Riding with the King, Rock Me Baby, Sweet Sixteen, Three O’Clock Blues, The Thrill Is Gone, Why I Sing the Blues, You Upset Me Baby.

Chuck Berry was one of the first singer/guitarists to bring that intangible element to blues music which gave the world rock and roll. Johnny B. Goode, Maybellene, Rock And Roll Music are three of his songs included in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. Others are Back in the U.S.A., Little Queenie, Roll Over Beethoven, Sweet Little Rock and Roller, Too Much Monkey Business, No Particular Place To Go and Carol.

As you listen to these great blues artists and try to read and play the guitar tabs of their music, you will find that the technical side of learning blues guitar is not so hard. Good luck with actually playing The blues!

To whet your appetite, here is a YouTube video of BB King Eric Clapton Buddy Guy Jim Vaughn:

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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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