Learn Blues Guitar

Many blues rhythm guitar parts follow a family of chord progressions called the 12 bar blues progression. The blues progression in A in its simplest form is as follows:

| A | A | A | A | D | D | A | A | E | E | A | A |

Some other variations on this include:

| A | A | A | A | D | D | A | A | E | D | A | E |

And it is very common to add 7th or 9th to chords in blues progressions, so adding the 7th we get:

| A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | D7 | D7 | A7 | A7 | E7 | D7 | A7 | E7 |

If you are familiar with interpreting chords in terms of their number in their chosen key, the blues progression is more generally represented as:

| I | I | I | I | IV | IV | I | I | V | IV | I | V |

If this notation is not familiar to you, the number essentially refers to which note of the scale the chord is being formed from (e.g. a D is the 4th note of the A major scale). If this is a bit confusing, not to worry, just see if you can work through the exercises in this lens.

Blues progressions are often played in the form of a shuffle. The simplest form of a blues shuffle I have encountered is as follows:







If you are new to blues rhythm guitar, I would encourage you to learn the above shuffle and blues progression. Practice the progressions until they become natural and then practice different strumming rhythms with the progressions and experiment with some swing rhythms on the shuffle. This involves lagging the second quaver of each beat past where it would be if you were to play it in straight time.

So this is some of the basics of blues rhythm guitar. If you are keen to delve some more into some good rhythm material, take a look at the Jamorama online guitar course to take the material further.

The first important step to learn blues lead guitar is to learn the blues scale. Here is the tab for the blues scale in A:



You will need to practice this scale every day until it becomes natural to you. You need to get to a stage where you can improvise using the notes of this scale. This involves using the notes of this scale to form blues phrases in a somewhat spontaneous way. If you are new to this, and that seems hard at the moment, not to worry, here are a few tabs that should help get the scale fluent and have you turning the scale into solos.

Once you're comfortable with the scale, it is useful to practice sequences of the scale to help ingrain it. A sequence is the notes of the scale played in a pattern. For example, if you numbered the notes of the scale 1, 2, 3, 4, ... then an example of a sequence would be to play these notes according to the pattern 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5, 4, 5, 6, ... This is probably the first sequence to practice, so to show you what we are talking about here, the tab for this sequence is:







Practice both the scale and this sequence of the scale until they feel natural to you.

Your next step to learn blues lead guitar is to learn to use the notes of the blues scale to form blues licks. These are phrases that use the notes of the scale in a way that sounds good. You ultimately want to be able to make up your own licks on the blues scale, but a good way to get started is to learn some existing licks. Here is the tab for a few. These licks, along with most blues guitar involve bending strings. If you're not quite up to that yet, form your own version of these licks by sliding between notes.

Blues lick 1:



Blues lick 2:



Blues lick 3:



The big thing about learning blues lead guitar is to practice over a blues rhythm part. You might want to record the blues shuffle shown above and practice mixing these licks up over the shuffle while you play it back, or alternativley the Jamorama guitar course comes with 26 pre made backing tracks to jam too. Then get into creating some of your own licks, experiment with the timing of the notes, figure out what sounds good to you, and you will be well on your way to learning blues improvisation, the main goal in learning blues lead guitar.

So I hope this has helped give a bit of a heads up on the basics of blues guitar. If you found this helpful and are keen to find some more material, the Jamorama guitar course is one of the main guitar courses online. This course has quite a lot of good material. One of the advantages of online courses over traditional books are the array of videos and backing tracks that such courses can provide, as well as packaged software that can come with the course. You can also check out the quality by subscribing to some free lessons to get a feel for what the course is about. If your interested, take a look at my Jamorama review to learn more.

Keep on practicing and I'm sure I'll see you at an open mic night blues jam soon.

Well , I've recently put together my new guitar site ManicGuitar.com to help learn guitar. This site has a number of articles that gives my view on the essentials to learn to play guitar. Additionally, I am building a collection of online guitar lessons. Be sure to check it out.