How To Play Blues Guitar Authentically

For just about anyone, you can learn how to play blues guitar in the same fashion as learning how to play any other type of guitar. The primary difference is in the feel while strumming, and the note choice of the scales. When you have those things together, it all boils down to of practice and patience.

Normally in pop and rock songs, eighth notes break each beat into two equal pieces. This division create the familiar “one & two & three & four &” feel that we’re used to in rock songs. Blues guitar on the other hand uses a swing feel, where each beat is broken into three pieces. Instead of “one & two &,” we get “one & a two & a three & a four & a.” Dividing the beats into three pieces creates what are called eighth note triplets. Since there are usually four beats per measure in the blues, you are usually playing four groups of three.

When starting out with learning blues guitar, you should practice strumming an easy chord like G7, which stands for G dominant 7, with a swing feel. always practice strumming down on the strong beats, those that fall on the one, two, three, or four, skip the ‘&,’ and strum up again on the ‘a.’ With that rhythm you get the do DAH do DAH do DAH do DAH sound made popular by artists such as Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, and Albert King.

One of the essential elements of learning how to play blues guitar is learning how to play a dominant seventh type of chord. All chords have 2 pieces, and blues guitar chords are no exception. If you have an A7 chord, you know two pieces of information from that name, you know that the chord starts on an A note, and you know it has a dominant seventh chord quality, or sound. Dominant seventh chords use the root, third, fifth, and flatted seventh of the major scale. It is that blending together of the major third and minor seventh scale degrees that give dominant seventh chords their unique appeal. In most forms of music, only the chord built from the fifth tone is permitted to be a dominant seventh chord. In blues, all of the chords are dominant seventh.

Finally, the blues scale is also unique. The minor blues scale is built from the root, flatted third, fourth, flatted fifth (or raised fourth), fifth, and flatted seventh degree of the major scale. The major blues scale is created from the root, second, flatted third, third, fifth, and sixth degrees of the major scale. What is interesting to note, is that the chords are all dominant seventh, which means that they have a major third, but the scale contains a flatted third. This use of the flatted third in the melody against the major third in the chord is one of the most obvious characteristics of blues music. The flatted third, along with the flatted fifth, help to give the blues, and blues based music, it’s ‘blueness.’

When learning how to play blues guitar, never forget the words of the great BB King, “The blues is the easiest music to learn, and the hardest to master.” Blues guitar is made up of simple ideas, which when used together create something great than the sum of their parts.

By: Griff Hamlin
Credit:www.superfeature.com