Blues Guitar Lessons
There is an area where some of the many guitar styles overlap. This is one of those
areas. While most blues guitar music has traditionally been played on the electric guitar, there is a great deal of
old time acoustic guitar blues as well as slide or "bottleneck" blues guitar to become familiar with. Playing the
blues requires a strong emotional connection to the music as well as knowing what to play while the singer is
singing and not just how to solo. Choosing the "right" scales, knowing the 8 bar, 12 bar, and 16 bar blues
progressions and loads of effective "turnarounds," fills, and phrasing with just the right combination of notes
with plenty of breathing room and syncopation are so important. This is why even though blues can seem like the
most natural of ways to play the guitar, that blues guitar lessons can elevate you to where you
want to be even faster and might even be more necessary.
Blues has become a language with many dialects. Just like the English
language can vary so much depending on whether you are north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line, or on the East
or West coast, or even more subtle variations, blues music varies greatly depending on whether it’s urban or
rural, big city or country. It has found its way into straight ahead rock’n’roll with groups like the Rolling
Stones, into all manner of Pop singers like Joan Osborne, and incredibly, because of the depth of its feeling,
into the very foundations of Jazz. It is in the realm of Jazz, however where blues tends to take on more of
the aspects of Jazz than Jazz taking on elements of blues.
Blues playing can go from being extremely simple to incredibly complex, and the
strange thing about it is that one isn’t necessarily better than the other. Blues is about feelings. When you’re
telling your troubles to a friend, sometimes one word is more effective in communicating where you are at than a
whole paragraph. It just depends on how well you express your feelings in the word or words you
choose.
I’ve had fairly elementary students learn how to play some of the simple lines that
B.B. King plays. The trick is learning how to express the lines with as much depth and feeling as B.B. does. There
are some very subtle techniques that have to do with how you fret the strings that can add to the emotion that is
present when you play. There are also some different approaches to vibrato that can heighten the impact that a
phrase has on the listener’s ear. Blues is filled with artifacts that change the note attack on the guitar. You can
find yourself sliding up to a note, sliding down, hammering up, pulling off down, bending up, and pre-bending and
releasing down. All these attack variations add to the unique voice that any phrase
expresses.
Blues can at first feel like one of the most natural ways to play the guitar, and yet
it is probably one of the most dependent on technique. You can become fully immersed in that technique by
taking blues
guitar lessons from the
Guitar Lesson Expert
.
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