Category: Blues Guitar

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:

Technorati Tags: free guitar tabs, blues guitar players, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Chuck Berry

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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.

Technorati Tags: blues guitar, blues guitarists, Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Eric Clapton, blues guitar tablature, Leadbelly, YouTube guitar video, Jimi Hendrix

Slide guitar is a facet of guitar playing that looks very sexy and sounds good with very little effort. In the early 1900’s dangerous looking dudes apparently loved to produce a wailing effect from their guitars by running a knife blade along the strings with their left hands instead of fretting the strings with their fingers. Some really outrageously dangerous dudes would break the neck off a bottle and slip it on their third or fourth fingers. If they were not careful how they placed the jagged end of the bottleneck, the guitar strings were not the only things doing the wailing. Anyhow, that’s how slide guitar started. So basically, instead of playing chords, you accompanied your blues song with a solo played by sliding your slide up and down the strings. If you wear your slide on your pinky you can lift it away from the strings so you can use your other fingers to fret chords between slide solos.
It is found by many slide guitarists to be a good idea to use open tunings for slide guitar. Here are some common ones:

Open D: d a d f# a d
Open G: d g d g b d
Open E: e b e g# b e
Open A: e a c# e a e OR e a e a c# e

When you are playing slide guitar you will need to damp strings as you go so you do not play unwanted notes. You can use the fingers of your left or right hand to do this but developing the technique will be your biggest challenge. Once you have developed some flair with the slide you might want to so some experimenting with some effects.
You will probably be wanting to head over to YouTube to check out some slide guitar videos, but I have included one here which gives you a lesson in basic slide guitar in standard tuning.

Technorati Tags: Slide guitar, YouTube, slide guitar videos