Five Things you Must Do when Learning the Blues
Without a doubt blues is the most popular sub style of guitar playing. While learning some styles can take years, getting started with the blues doesn’t have to and I’ve got 5 tips that if you take the time to learn and follow them will propel you ahead of the pack when taking blues guitar lessons.
The Twelve Bar Blues
If there is one essential ingredient in everything blues, it’s the 12 bar blues pattern. While there is a little theory behind the 12 bar blues it won’t take too much to understand it.
The 12 bar blues are a simple pattern that uses the I, IV and V chords from a given key. If one, four, five is new to you then you may want to familiarize yourself with it first, how ever it’s not all that tough to understand.
The pattern of the 12 Bar blues is then 12 bars consisting of 4 beats each. Here’s the pattern:
1 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 4 – 4 – 1 – 1 – 5 – 4 – 1 – 5
In the example above the 1 is for the one chord, the 4 the four chord and the 5 the five chord.
Get to Know Seventh Chords
If there was only one way to Blues up a chord progression I’d say it would have to be changing major chords to seventh chords during any 12 bar blues progression. For example if you were playing A, D and E then change those out to be the A seventh, D seventh and E seventh chords. There are a few different places on the neck you can play a 7th chord including open as well as barre chords.
Understand the Blues Scales
The blues scales are basically a regular pentatonic 5 note scale with a ??oblues note??? added in. Like a regular pentatonic scale you can play these in several positions around the neck in a different key so knowing where the root note is an important part of learning to play lead to a particular 12 bar blues progression.
Don’t Over complicate
Beginners have a tendency to want to over complicate things when it comes to scales, progressions and the like. Generally speaking some of the sweetest sounding blues licks are also the easiest to play. Be sure that you do take some proper blues instruction whether that be from a private instructor or you purchase a blues guitar course.
Practice with Jam Tracks
Likely one of the most over looked practice techniques that will sharpen your lead playing skills and musical understanding is practice with blues jam tracks. A backing track is basically a song without a guitar track recorded. You can play this track on your computer, stereo or MP3 player and play along with it. These are extremely useful when you reach the point of learning blues guitar licks and lead techniques.
The majority of online guitar lesson memberships offer jam tracks in their practice tools, also most DVD lessons include a CD or two of backing tracks to practice with as well.
If you’re ready to start playing blues guitar take a moment to visit our website where we compare & review the some of the best blues guitar lessons, we evaluate online guitar courses and DVDs.
