Guitar How-To

Archive for the ‘Blues Guitar’ Category

Blues guitar music has a distinctive sound. This sound is produced by the addition of an extra note to the pentatonic minor scale. The extra note is a flattened fifth note of the scale. If you are playing in the key of A minor, the extra note – or blue note – is E flat. Why do you need to learn all this stuff? Because if you learn your blues scales and practice then relentlessly you will find that you will have been transformed from an ugly duckling to an ugly blues guitarist who can improvise anywhere, any time.

Here is the pentatonic scale in the key of A minor:

e|——————————5–8–5—————————-
B|————————5–8———-8–5———————–
G|——————-5–7——————–7–5——————
D|————–5–7——————————-7–5————
A|———5–7——————————————7–5——
E|–5–8——————————————————8–5-

Here is the blues scale in the key of A minor:

e|——————————–5-8-5—————————
B|—————————5-8———8-5———————-
G|———————5-7-8—————–8-7-5—————-
D|—————-5-7——————————7-5————
A|———5-6-7—————————————7-6-5——
E|–5–8—————————————————–8–5-

For info on blues chord progressions see my post on The Blues Scale And The I IV V Progression.

Here is a lesson on the blues scale from Justin Sandercoe:

This video shows some great ideas for brightening up your blues guitar playing. It’s especially good that Simon uses an acoustic guitar to demonstrate his licks. This makes the power of the music obvious without overshadowing it with electronic effects . . .

The raw material you use for playing blues on guitar is a collection of notes called a scale. There are lots of different scales with names like melodic or harmonic minor, phrygian mode or the blues scale. They have different names because each sequence of notes sounds musical in a limited number of settings. The practice of dividing music up into scales and chords and genres comes from European musical tradition which contains a large theoretical component. The blues, on the other hand, originated with people who carried it over to America inside themselves and sang and played it without thinking whether the instruments they used were appropriate or how to pass on the music in written form.

So here we are trying to reconcile the two approaches to music. Our guide to whether we are successful in our efforts is the way the music makes us, and our listeners, feel.

This YouTube guitar video is a great start to learning how to play the blues on guitar . . .

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