The best blues electric guitar tutorial. How to play the blues

Blues is a very diverse and interesting genre of music. Two compositions can be very different from each other - and you won’t think that they are the same direction. It is performed by street musicians and world-famous stars such as Gary Moore. In this article we will look at how to play blues on guitar.

Fingers or slide?

A slide is a special tube of metal, glass or ceramic that fits over your finger and is used to pinch the strings. When the string comes into contact not with the soft pad of the finger, but with a metal surface, the sound of the guitar changes beyond recognition. Since the very beginning of the genre, blues and slide have gone hand in hand.

But there are no strict canons here. If you like to play with your hands, please. If you want bright vibrato and authentic sound, try slide. You don’t even have to buy it - take a glass bottle or, for example, a folding knife. This will be enough to understand whether you like this sound or not.

A professional slide won't sound any better than a bottle. The difference is that you don't have to hold it with your whole hand. The tube is put on only one finger, and the rest will be free. Thus, guitarists can combine slide playing techniques with classical ones.

You can understand how full and spacious the sound of a guitar is if you buy a twelve-string guitar.

Features of 12-strings:

• reinforced western or jumbo hull;
• wide neck;
• metal strings placed in pairs - thick with winding and thin without winding. The strings are tuned in unison, however, starting from the third pair, the thin string is always tuned an octave higher.

Where to buy a 12 string guitar?

For a musician who is good at playing a six-string guitar, the desire to buy a 12-string guitar in Moscow or another region of Russia is quite understandable.

When choosing a store where to buy a 12-string guitar, take a closer look at specialized stores that offer not only cheap instruments. An inexpensive twelve-string guitar is a great temptation , however, it should be remembered that 12 strings cause a powerful load on the body of the guitar, therefore one of the main parameters of a twelve-string is its strength.

Preparing for the game

This section of the manual is for those who want to learn to play the blues on an electric guitar. In the case of acoustics, no preparation is needed - just take it and play. But here it is possible to tweak the equalizer or add a couple of pedals to the chain, getting the desired sound.

First and most important: forget about distortion. Bluesmen use either a clean or slightly loaded sound, that is, a slight overdrive. A high level of gain will produce a lot of disgusting noise and will greatly increase the grinding sound on the braid of the strings. It also compresses the flow, cutting off all the dynamics of the blues sound.

There are dedicated blues pedals, such as the Boss Blues Driver. If you can't find one, use regular overdrive. It's important not to overdo it here. In some compositions, the Wah-Wah effect will work well. But at the learning stage it is better not to touch it.

Second tip: don’t turn up too many frequencies in the equalizer. Instead of raising the middle, it is better lower the bass and treble levels. This simple trick will give you a more pleasant and natural sound.

Blues pentatonic scale

The most interesting thing about the blues is improvisation. Without it, you can’t compose your own melody, nor can you embellish someone else’s. And to improvise, you need to know what notes you have at your disposal.

The blues scale is based on minor pentatonic scale. Between the 3rd and 4th degrees another note is added. It is she who helps create that very characteristic sound. Over decades of trial and error, bluesmen have discovered the 5 most comfortable positions ( boxing) for Game.

The red dot is tonic, the main note from which the melody is built. Blue is that extra sound. Choose any fret on the guitar and try to play all the notes in each position one by one. Even without additional techniques, you will immediately feel this special character of the melodies.

Try to learn all the boxes so that your fingers can easily run along the strings “automatically.” If you constantly think about what to clamp, there will be no question of any improvisation.

Building a melody

Once you get used to the pentatonic fingerings, you can start improvising. First, try playing the same scale, but with different rhythmic patterns. Combine eighth and quadruple notes. Change direction, “jump” through 1-2 steps of the scale, take pauses. After a while, your hands will remember which technique sounds good and which one sounds so-so.

Don't forget the metronome. Rhythm in music is very important. One should not forget about it either during the performance of slow, “pulling” compositions, or even more so, in pumping driving riffs. Perhaps practicing with a metronome will be unusual and difficult for you. But without this you cannot develop a good sense of rhythm.

Try playing in different positions. Nobody forbids changing them during the game. The riffs will sound slightly different in different boxes. Experiment more and get a lot of interesting melodies into your collection.

Bend, slide and vibrato

Not a single blues composition can do without these three techniques. They are the ones who enliven the melody, making it bright and unique.

Slide- the simplest method. It sounds especially impressive when playing with a slide (such a terminological tautology). Actually, the whole playing technique comes down to the fact that you never take the tube off the strings, but move it along their surface. There is always sound, even when changing the position of the hand.

If you play with your fingers, the essence remains the same. For example, you pinch the string at the 5th fret, make a sound, and then move down to the 7th fret. There is no need to let go of your finger. Speed ​​depends on the context: sometimes you need to move quickly, sometimes you need to move smoothly.

The next important technique in blues is bend. This is a change in pitch without changing the fret. You press the string down and then guide it along the fret. It tightens and sounds higher. Typically bends are a tone or semitone. It's not difficult to make. The difficult thing is to learn how to tighten the strings so that the resulting sound belongs to your scale.

This is a very important point. If you bend by only a quarter tone, it will not fit into the melody and will cause dissonance. If you tighten the string by a semitone, but get a note that is not included in your pentatonic scale, there will be dissonance again.

For example: between the 3rd and 4th degrees of your scale the distance is only half a tone (1 guitar fret). You can pluck the string at the 7th fret and then pluck it until it sounds the same as if you plucked it at the 8th fret. You can pull even higher - up to the 9th fret - and get the 5th degree of the pentatonic scale.

Another universal technique - vibrato. When you play a long note (for example, the 4th among an array of 8s), it can be given a special color and attract attention. If you know how to bend, mastering vibrato will be easy. Simply increase and decrease the tension to get the characteristic shake. You can change the pitch just a little, or you can achieve an amplitude of 2 tones. What and when sounds better can only be understood by experimenting.

This little material will help you get started. And then it’s just a matter of practice. Listen to different performers, watch street musicians play, try to compose your own melodies, add chords to the composition, actively use bends and slides. The best way to learn to play the blues is to play them.

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Where and how to buy high-quality 12 string guitars? You can find out more details

Dear guitarists! Just recently I finished work on a self-instruction manual, which I decided to write three years ago.

The tutorial is called - Blues on guitar. Improvisation lessons

Blues improvisation is a skill that will help you not only play blues solos, but will also bring you closer to understanding improvisation in general - in rock, jazz and other styles.

The tutorial consists of text explanations, educational tablature, audio examples, etc. For those who studied my first work, I will say that this tutorial is made in the same format.

50 lessons, 4 chapters, about 90 pages of typed tablature information and more than a year of daily work.

You can download the local version of the tutorial

Good day, gentlemen, guitarists. This article, which is essentially a lesson, will focus on the blues. More precisely, how to start playing it if you still don’t know how to do it. We will now take two points as a basis: improvisation and accompaniment. If you have never improvised before, it doesn’t matter, now you’ll learn.

And we’ll start, perhaps, with improvisation. First you need to learn the A minor pentatonic scale. A pentatonic scale is a mode or scale that has only 5 sounds. This scale is very often used in blues guitar playing. In my opinion, this is the easiest place to start playing blues touches. Here's the fret:

First of all, you need to learn this Am pentatonic scale (A minor). As you can see, it is played from the 5th fret of the sixth string to the 5th fret of the first string. You just need to remember its fingering - the sequence of movement of sounds on the guitar neck, or in other words - the pattern of the fret on the guitar neck.

Having played the Am pentatonic scale, you are ready to start improvising. You will do this to accompaniment. But first, I’ll say a few words about the principles of improvisation. Improvisation is a spontaneous game when you play whatever happens - as your hand takes it. This process should take place with you without conscious control. Try not to think about how to play. Just play within the given scale you just learned.

Now regarding the accompaniment. Here I present what I think is one of the most common blues chord structures:

You can record the accompaniment yourself and improvise along with it, or you can ask someone to play along with you. It is not necessary to play the accompaniment exactly as shown in the figure. Here I just wanted to demonstrate how the chords go. The fifth chord is A for two bars. Then one measure of D, then again a return to A. Next Mi and Re one bar each and... again two bars of A. Then everything repeats itself. Improvise in A minor pentatonic scale to this accompaniment.

Finally, I want to say something about repetition. You may well come up with one motive, for example, one bar long. And play it throughout the accompaniment. Changing chords will give this tune a typical blues flavor. OK it's all over Now. If you know how to play the guitar in the slightest degree, then the recommendations from this lesson are enough for you to start playing the blues. Take action!

Hello everyone, guitar lovers. Today, by tradition, we have a lesson for beginners. In this short lesson I will tell you how you can play the blues on your six-string acoustic guitar or electric guitar. I will also publish a diagram where you can see the most common blues chords.

If you are interested in blues, jazz and improvisation, then I would like to recommend the new educational portal natomiya-music.rf, where you can find a lot of free information and lessons on these and other equally interesting musical topics.

In fact, playing this musical style (blues) is not difficult, just know a few basic concepts and techniques, practice a little and you can play the blues no worse than B.B. King.

Chords

Below, according to the text, you can familiarize yourself with a diagram that shows the most popular blues chords. Instructions on how to read these chords and their diagrams are also included.

• The circuit consists of a grid that consists of six vertical lines (strings) and five horizontal lines (sills). As you might have guessed, these lines illustrate the strings and nuts on a guitar. Their intersection forms the frets on a six-string guitar;
• At the top of the diagram there is a letter indicating the name of the chord depicted in the diagram;
• Just below the letter, you can see two signs: a cross and a zero. They indicate a closed (not played) and open (must be played open) string, respectively;
• The diagram itself has black marks that point and show which fret you need to press to play the chords;
• Below the diagram you can see numbers from one to four. These numbers indicate which finger is preferable to press on one fret or another when you play chords. If you count the fingers from left to right, on the inside of the palm, then the first is the index finger, the fourth is the little finger, and the thumb is not indicated by a number.

Exercises

I have prepared an exercise for you that will allow you to develop your blues improvisation technique. Below you can see the tablature for this exercise (a video lesson on reading tablature is also below).

You need to play like this:

Video

Below you can watch a video lesson on the topic discussed in this article.

Game techniques

I would also like to say a few words about the guitar playing techniques that blues players often use:

• Bend- a method of playing the guitar in which the note being played is raised to the required height as it is played. The duration of bends can be: short or long;
• Vibrato- a technique of playing the guitar in which sound is produced by vibrating the string. A very expressive and popular technique, very often used in blues.

That's all for today, I hope you understand the technique and techniques of playing and can play the blues.

Self-instruction manual: "Blues on electric guitar"
Year of issue: 2005
Publisher: Akella
A country: Russia
Genre: Multimedia / training

Description: “Blues on Electric Guitar” is a media school for beginning guitarists who want to master one of the popular trends in music – the blues. With this program you will receive all the necessary theoretical knowledge, learn to accompany in various blues styles, and learn to improvise.

The training is based on the study of riffs and solos of the most famous blues musicians, such as: B.B. King, Eric Claptone, Steve Ray Vaughan and others.

All lessons and examples are clearly illustrated with video and audio materials. Particular attention is paid to improvisation. One of the main objectives of the program is to develop your own, unique and recognizable style. In addition, you will learn how to choose a guitar and additional equipment for playing in the blues style, as well as about the features of sound production.

The school is designed for those who already own an electric guitar, and was conceived as the second part of the “School of Playing the Electric Guitar. Akella"

Video: DivX 3 720x576 25.00 FPS
Audio: MPEG Audio Layer 3 48000Hz stereo 256 kbps