Category: Blues Guitar

One of the first things you need to understand when learning blues guitar is that you will be using the guitar to imitate a person singing. When we say that the blues scale is the major scale with the 3rd, 5th and seventh played flat, that is just a rather awkward way of translating a style of singing which was originally passed on orally from person to person, into notation for a musical instrument. Another fuzzy idea concerning blues music is the concept of feeling the music. The blues is an emotive music - playing it will help you feel it. And the music itself, no matter what is in the heart of the musician, will evoke some kind of an emotional response in the audience. All the guitarist needs to do is play well. Not necessarily technically perfect but doing your job as a soloist or part of a group.
Now to begin to play the blues. Let’s say you want to improvise in the key of C. Go to the Jam Center jam track page for the key of C. You will see where you click to start your blues backing track and a link to the suggested scales to use.
What you have to do here is give yourself a pattern of notes to play. Not a “riff” or a “lick”, just a bunch of notes that more or less resembles a melody. A quick example is “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. Let’s try it like this: you have the first line of the song in your head and you play it using these notes C D Eb D G Bb G. That is your beginning. The secret to improvising is to start at any old place and let the music wander. So play some notes over the backing track and notice that as you warm up you relax a little and your playing gets better! If you want to be a blues guitarist, repeat this process every day until you know for sure you do not need it any more.

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Blues solos are made up of licks strung together. Sometimes it is a bit daunting for guitar students to try make up their own blues solos. Today’s post introduces a video of a guitarist breaking up a solo into its components. The video is from Riffeo Video Music Lessons and Jam Tracks Community “. . . the world’s first music lesson file sharing site” where you can upload your favorite lessons, licks, songs, riffs, jam tracks, whatever you can contribute to help others learn and have fun with their instrument!” Well! The video is called Blues solo in A

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After the Second World War youthful artists like Elvis Presley and Bill Haley were wrapping the blues in a new envelope called “rock’n'roll” and the players of the electric blues guitar like B.B. King were heralding the arrival of the lead guitar, soon to be a great attraction for both musicians and audiences. Throughout the evolution of the blues the electric guitar had always been used for solos in jazz bands but now it competed with the singer for the awareness of the listeners.
The blues can be played in any key that takes your heart desires and comes in three central forms: eight bars, for example “Heartbreak Hotel”, sixteen bars like “Saint James Infirmary” and twelve bars like “St. Louis Blues”. For some reason the twelve bar blues form is way more singer-friendly and popular with audiences than the other two, and it is the base of many great songs beyond the blues idiom.
If you go searching the internet you will find that the blues scales are just your common major and minor scales except that the third, fifth and seventh notes are played flat. However, you may be astonished to learn that blues players managed for centuries lacking knowledge about European musical theory. They learnt to sing and play from their families and friends just as many of the fresh white blues players of the nineteen sixties learnt from imitating the artists they heard on records.
And this is where the blues takes another course. After years of imitating their idols something odd happened to the white blues guitar players in Britain and the USA. They developed their own authentic, earliest styles. The elder blues players even began using the new arrangements of classic songs and adopting some of the unbluesy musical innovations introduced by young white guitarists like Eric Clapton. So the beat goes on. An alien culture influences American popular music and in turn gets fresh input from a new generation of guitar players from all over the world.
The Blues Guitar’s Influence On Music

. . . and here is a YouTube guitar video
Play Blues Guitar Like T Bone Walker
Michael Williams explains how to spice up your rhythm guitar playing and get that T Bone Walker sound by adding chromatic approaches to the chords in your favorite blues guitar progressions.

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