Guitar Lessons

Bending – stretching a string vertically downwards or upwards to raise the pitch. An effective way to create blue notes. Half bend: bending so that the pitch is raised by a 1/2 tone (sounding like the next fret). If you do a half bend on the 5. fret, the pitch will be like a normal…

The blues scale is a pentatonic scale, with an added note (b5) marked blue. Position 1 Position 2 Position 3 Position 5 This is a minor blues scale in position 1. From E, 12. Fret. Blue notes These notes adds tension and dissonance to the scale, which is an important element in the sound of…

Improvisation and soloing is a large part in playing Blues guitar. Not only when playing guitar solos, but also for example when accompanying, playing fills and different chord-voicings and rhythms. In this lesson we will focus on the guitar solos. Blues is very simple harmonically, so it is quite easy to acquire the basic knowledge…

Blues riffs is usually repeating patterns, played on the lowest strings on the guitar. They are often based on power-chords, and some of them are more melodic, using the “blues-scale”, which we will take a look at later in the part about improvisation. One thing that is nice about blues riffs, is that they usually…

Ways of playing the chords Now that you got the blues form and chords, we can look at how to actually play these chords. They can be strummed with the pick, or plucked with your fingers. Here is some basic rhythm examples, they are shown with the E5 chord type, but try it out on…

Guide Tones Another alternative way of playing these chords, is to use something we call “guide-tones”, which is a chord type where we only play 2 notes in each chord. These notes should be near the notes in the next chord, so that there is almost no harmonic movement when changing the chords. In this…

Harmonically the blues is very simple, with only 3 different chords that is divided over a form of 12 bars. There is different types of Blues, 32 bar blues, 16 bar blues, but in this lesson we will focus on the most common 12-bar blues. Let’s take a look at this 12-bar blues in E…