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Jon Chappell
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Published:
July 21, 2020

Blues Guitar For Dummies

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Overview

Want to become the coolest possible version of yourself?

Time to jump into learning the blues guitar. Even if you don’t read music, Blues Guitar For Dummies lets you pick up the fundamentals and start jamming like your favorite blues artists.

Blues Guitar for Dummies covers the key aspects of blues guitar, showing you how to play scales, chords, progressions, riffs, solos, and more. This hands-on guide is packed with musical examples, chords charts, and photos that let you explore the genre and play the songs of all the great blues musicians. This accessible how-to book will give you the skills you need to:

  • Choose the right guitar, equipment, and strings
  • Hold, tune, and get situated with your guitar
  • Play barre chords and strum to the rhythm
  • Recognize the structure of a blues song
  • Tackle

musical riffs

  • Master melodies and solos
  • Make your guitar sing, cry, and wail
  • Jam to any type of blues

    • Additionally, the book comes with a website that shares audio samples of all the examples covered in the lessons. Go online to practice your riffs and chords and develop your style as a blues musician.

    Order your copy of Blues Guitar For Dummies today and get ready to start shredding!

    P.S. If you think this book seems familiar, you’re probably right. The Dummies team updated the cover and design to give the book a fresh feel, but the content is the same as the previous release of Blues Guitar For Dummies (9780470049204). The book you see here shouldn’t be considered a new or updated product. But if you’re in the mood to learn something new, check out some of our other books. We’re always writing about new topics!

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    About The Author

    Jon Chappell has jammed with countless blues musicians at Chicago's blues clubs. He is an award-winning guitarist and composer as well as past editor- in-chief of Guitar Magazine and Home Recording Magazine. His other books include Guitar For Dummies, Guitar Exercises For Dummies, Classical Guitar For Dummies, and Rock Guitar For Dummies

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    CHEAT SHEET

    To play blues guitar, first you have to know the basics of guitar in general, which means identifying the parts of a guitar and being able to translate a chord diagram. Then, you can get familiar with common open and moveable chord forms and create your own blues guitar style.Guitar parts, chord diagrams, and tablatureTo play blues guitar, or any style of guitar music, it helps to be able to identify the parts of the guitar, which are identified in the diagram below.
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    Although the 12-bar blues progression has a signature blues sound, if you plan to play blues, rock, or jazz guitar on a regular basis, you'll want to learn how to accessorize the 12-bar blues. Intros, turnarounds, and endings are common enhancements to the 12-bar blues that are used to steer the song toward repeats or resolutions.
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    To play blues guitar, first you have to know the basics of guitar in general, which means identifying the parts of a guitar and being able to translate a chord diagram. Then, you can get familiar with common open and moveable chord forms and create your own blues guitar style.Guitar parts, chord diagrams, and tablatureTo play blues guitar, or any style of guitar music, it helps to be able to identify the parts of the guitar, which are identified in the diagram below.
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    Blues guitar is about style, not about hardware. Blues guitar doesn't use different chords than any other style of guitar playing; you just use them in different configurations to create different effects. Twenty of the most comment open-position chords used in playing blues guitar — or any guitar style — are
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    There are many things to consider when choosing among amp styles for electric guitar. The type of amp is defined by the sound-producing technology it uses, and the technology used affects the way your music sounds. So when shopping for an amp, you should be aware of what’s under the hood. Tube amps Vacuum tubes are the big, glass cylinders in amps that glow orange and get hot the more they’re used.
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    In blues, rock, and jazz guitar, there are times when you want to add extra interest to the blues harmony. You can do this by adding a sweet note — an extra chromatic note not found in the six-note blues scale. When you want to spice things up a bit, there are a few sweet notes you can work with. In the case of the major third of a chord, it’s a very defining sound in swing and Texas blues and is often nicknamed the sweet note.
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    To play blues guitar, or any style of guitar music, it helps to be able to identify the parts of the guitar, which are identified here. It also helps to be able to read chord diagrams and the six-line guitar tablature that tell you which frets press on which strings. A sample chord diagram and tablature are s
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    After you develop a feel for different guitar strumming combinations, you can increase the rhythmic variations by learning how to apply syncopation to your guitar playing. Syncopation is the disruption or alteration of the expected rhythm of notes. In rhythmic guitar playing, you can apply syncopation by staggering your strum and mixing up your up- and downstrokes to strike different parts of the beats.
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    The pentatonic scale is a wonderful invention for guitarists — and can save you from sounding bad during a guitar solo. On the flip side, because this is such a "safe" scale, it can lack color or teeth. You can add some blues bite and grit to the minor pentatonic scale by throwing in the interval of a flatted 5 — Bb in the key of E minor.
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    When you go shopping for a new guitar, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of guitars available in every style. It's important to know how to evaluate a guitar's quality to ensure that you are getting the right guitar for you. Knowing how to evaluate guitar can help you understand how two similar guitars can be so different with respect to materials, workmanship, and options.
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    Blues guitar can take many forms, which means that learning how to get the blues sound is an evolving process. However, by identifying specific techniques, notes, and patterns to follow, you can begin finding your own blues sound. Open Tuning: The original blues players were largely self taught (and many of them illiterate), and one of the easiest ways to create different chords was to tune the guitar to an open chord, such as G major or E major, and then use a metal or glass slide (a pocket knife or bottle neck) to change chords.
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    Guitarist Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top set the standard of "soulfulness" in the rock guitar world with his smoldering pinch harmonic solos. You can add soulfulness to your guitar music by learning how to play pinch harmonics, too. Although Gibbons is a masterful blues guitar player with a well-rounded playing approach, he’s best known for his edge-of-the-pick (also known as pinch) harmonics.
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    The 12-bar blues is by far the most popular form for the blues. Once you learn to play the 12-bar blues on the guitar, you can play such classic blues pieces as "Hound Dog," “Stormy Monday,” “Kansas City,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Easy Rider,” and “Corrina, Corrina.” Each of these songs follows the 12-bar blues pattern of three lines per verse, with the first line repeated.
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    The backbone of guitar playing is the basic chord, and learning how to play an E major chord is a great place to start. A chord is defined as the simultaneous sounding of three or more notes of different-named pitches. You can’t, however, just play any group of notes, like all six open strings — the notes must form a musically meaningful arrangement.
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    If you have the basic 12-bar blues under your belt, it’s time to learn how to play the Jimmy Reed move on your guitar. This move will help you shake things up a bit. The Jimmy Reed move has been a blues guitar and rock guitar staple forever. The Jimmy Reed move — named after the Chicago harmonica player, singer, and guitarist — involves going from the fifth to the sixth degrees in each chord (the note E in a G chord, A in a C chord).
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    It is important to know how to test an electric guitar amplifier before you buy one to ensure that it meets your needs. When choosing an amp, you need to take several things into consideration, such as tone, distortion, features, and budget. Without testing it, you can't fully evaluate the sound that it creates.
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    When you start working with an amplifier, you need to know how to tune it up properly so that when you play your guitar, you don't blow it out. Every amp is different, so you'll want to familiarize yourself with the various levels and controls of your new amplifier so that you get to know its unique quirks. Remember that different amps have different controls and front-panel arrangements, but there are some basics steps that are important to work out on every amp.
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    When it comes to rhythm guitar, you need to learn how to stop the strings. Just listen to blues rhythm guitar and you'll hear that it’s not one repetitive wall of sound, but an open, varied sound with breathing room and subtle breaks. These breaks are what prevent the chord strums from running together. The little gaps in sound keep the music sounding crisp and controlled.
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    Knowing how to read and use pick-strum patterns is a great way to provide rhythmic variety and introduce different textures into your guitar playing. Pick-strum patterns separate the bass and treble so they play independently. In the pick-strum pattern, the pick refers to picking the single bass note, and the strum refers to the upper-string chord that follows.
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    Moveable chords have no open positions. Blues guitar playing uses moveable chord forms as much as any other type of guitar style, including the common 6th-string root chords shown here: Moveable chords with the root on the 6th string. Common moveable chords rooted on the 5th string include these: Moveable chords with the root on the 5th string.
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    Slide guitar may have become a stylistic choice over fretted guitar out of necessity by players who didn't have the skills or patience to fret the guitar and found it easy to slide a smooth, rounded object over the strings to achieve a similar effect. But for the greatest blues practitioners, such as Charlie Patton, Sylvester Weaver, Blind Willie Johnson, Son House, and Robert Johnson, slide guitar was an unparalleled mode of expression evocative of the human voice as well as the wail of train whistles — a sound near and dear to country blues guitarists.
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    Electric guitars came on the scene only in the late 1930s, and then only to those who could afford them. Thus, the acoustic guitar in blues had a long run, and the style continued even after the advent of the more-popular electric guitar. The acoustic guitar remained popular for other types of music (mainly folk and country), but for blues, the electric guitar was the instrument of choice from about 1940 on.
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    Slide guitar is physically easy in one sense — just drag a slide over the strings, and you can instantly hear the effect, right? However, proper slide guitar technique is not quite that simple. It can be difficult to control the sliding and keep the buzzing and rattling artifacts to a minimum.Slide an object like a glass or metal tube over a left-hand finger.
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    One difference between changing guitar strings on and acoustic versus and electric guitar is that an acoustic uses removable bridge pins to hold the strings in place at the bridge. Bridge pins require a little more fiddling to get them to secure correctly to the string in place at the bridge. Take it slowly. If you think you haven't executed a step correctly, simply undo what you've done and start over.
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    Playing the guitar can be a sweaty, muscular, gritty activity — if you're doing it correctly, that is. And while your guitar can handle pretty much any abuse you deliver (within reason), your strings aren't so hardy. Through repeated contact with hands and fingers, guitar strings lose their tone and won't play in tune; they also wear out and eventually may break.
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    One of the best things about the blues is that it isn’t all that hard to play, technically speaking. However, learning how to use expression when you play blues guitar is the best way to bring your guitar playing to a whole new level. Playing lead or rhythm in most blues songs requires only intermediate technique.
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    One of the most basic ways you can play chords is with a strum. Strumming the guitar is the simple act of brushing the strings with a pick, thumb, or the back of your fingernails. A strum can be slow, fast, hard, or gentle, or any of the infinite shadings in between. Downstrokes: You are “executing a downstroke,” when you go to naturally strike the strings on a guitar.
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    Slide guitar can be played in standard or open tunings, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. Learning the various different methods to tune for slide guitar will give you more options to let you suit the tunings to your playing style. Standard tuning can be easier to play because your melodic instincts don’t have to be translated to the altered tuning of the guitar; however, it can make it harder for the beginning slide guitarist to mute the unwanted strings creating a dissonant sound.
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    There is a strong tradition in using slide guitar for the blues. Slide guitar became a stylistic choice over fretted guitar by players who didn’t have the skills or patience to fret the guitar and found it easier to slide a smooth, rounded object over the strings to achieve a similar effect. But whatever its origin, slide guitar is a staple of the acoustic blues guitar sound unlikely to ever be imitated by synthetic, digital means.
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    Robert Johnson (1911–1938) is universally recognized as the King of the Delta Blues, and for good reason. Robert Johnson's playing style, which is called the Robert Johnson Progression, has influenced all the blues guitarists that followed. Johnson influenced so many aspects of the blues — through his playing, his songwriting, and his aura.
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