How to Play Blues on Guitar

How to Play Blues on Guitar How to Play Blues on Guitar Hardly any musicians can imagine blues music without the use of guitar. Playing blues on your guitar can be an emotional lift for many guitarists. If you listen to the blues rendition of legends like BB King, Albert King, T. Bone Walker and Robert Johnson, it can take you to an entirely different sphere of musical high.

If you’re passionate about playing blues sound on your guitar, it can be a totally overwhelming experience. Blues guitar can have many forms and learning how to play blues on guitar is a gradual and evolving process. However, if you learn the specific style, patterns and techniques of playing blues guitar, there’s no reason why you can’t get better at playing blues on your guitar. To begin with, you should try to learn the basic blues rhythm and go about learning their fundamental strumming techniques.

So let’s learn a bit about playing blues on guitar:

Tuning Your Guitar: One of the most important things to know about playing blues on guitar are tuning your guitar correctly. If you want to play blues, you should try to tune your guitar for the open chord such as G major or E major. Besides, you can use metal slide (pocket knife, for example) to change the chords.

Picking Your Strings: When you are done with your tuning, picking your strings becomes the next important step. Whether you want to do slide pattern or fretted pattern, you should try to thump out steady bass notes on the lower strings with your thumb, while picking the upper strings to create fills, chords and riffs.

Chord Progression: A blues song is defined by the way you put together the chords on your guitar. Remember, there is no blues chord on your guitar; however, you need to use certain chords to create the sound of blues. This is known as chord progression. One of the most popular blues chord progressions is 12-bar blues.

Blue Notes: It is also important to recognize and practice with the blue notes on your guitar. Usually, the minor third (b3), minor seventh (b7) and flatted fifth (b5) on your guitar constitute the blue notes, which are used to create a blue scale on your guitar. These notes are especially used to create a harmonic blues sound on your guitar.

Playing The Blues Rhythm: Try to strum the E-major chord on your guitar using down strokes and playing square notes (like counting 1-2-3-4 slowly). Then pick the eight notes and change your rhythm to 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Counting is very important component of your practice for playing blues on your guitar. While you are at either notes, you can try changing the counting and playing triplets (like 1 and the 2 and the 3 and the 4).

After a while of practice; while you are learning, try to incorporate the major scale and blue notes to come up with the 5- note and 6- note blue scale. Practice is the most important thing while learning to play blues guitar sounds on your guitar. You could also listen to the guitar recordings of some blue guitar legends to feel the blues rhythm which will help you create a feel of blues on your own. So keep up the practice until you master the blues guitar rhythm. Good luck!