How to Play Blues Guitar For BEginners

The blues is kind of a hybrid between a major tonality and a minor tonality, so it’s like its own world. One of the best things about the blues is you can learn just a couple of small things and then jump in to playing and expressing yourself. If you learn to play the blues really well, you’ll have an excellent tool and color to use in your guitar playing, and when it’s appropriate, you can pull it up in other styles of music you play too.

There are a few things that it would be good for you to know before you start the Blues Guitar Quick-Start Series. We’ll be going through everything step-by-step, but it would be good if you know basic bar chords, basic power chords, the shuffle rhythm, note subdivisions, and hammer-ons and pull-offs. If you need to review any of these skills, you can check some of my other lessons.

It doesn’t matter if you play acoustic or electric in this series because everything we’ll cover is equally important for both types of guitar. The goal of this series is to make sure you’re familiar with the most important things you need to know for blues rhythm guitar and blues lead guitar.

We’ll start this series off by going through the blues 12-bar progression, and then we’ll learn some dominant seventh chords and how to apply them to the 12-bar progression. From there, we’ll dress things up a little bit by going through a couple of rhythm blues riffs to use with the 12-bar progression too. With everything you’ll learn in this series, the possibilities for your rhythm blues guitar playing can really only be limited by the amount of effort you put in and your own creativity.

Once we get the blues rhythm basics down, we’ll switch our focus to blues lead guitar. We’ll start by learning a shape for the blues scale. If you already know minor pentatonic scale this will be pretty easy for you because all you have to do is add one more note.

After you’re familiar with the blues scale, I’ll teach you how to start choosing your notes rather than just randomly playing through the scale shape. After that, we’ll look at turnaround licks and how they can be incorporated into your playing.

The guitar is an ancient and noble instrument, whose history can be traced back over 4000 years. Many theories have been advanced about the instrument's ancestry. It has often been claimed that the guitar is a development of the lute, or even of the ancient Greek kithara. Research done by Dr. Michael Kasha in the 1960's showed these claims to be without merit. He showed that the lute is a result of a separate line of development, sharing common ancestors with the guitar, but having had no influence on its evolution. The influence in the opposite direction is undeniable, however - the guitar's immediate forefathers were a major influence on the development of the fretted lute from the fretless oud which the Moors brought with them to to Spain.

The sole "evidence" for the kithara theory is the similarity between the greek word "kithara" and the Spanish word "quitarra". It is hard to imagine how the guitar could have evolved from the kithara, which was a completely different type of instrument - namely a square-framed lap harp, or "lyre".

It would also be passing strange if a square-framed seven-string lap harp had given its name to the early Spanish 4-string "quitarra". Dr. Kasha turns the question around and asks where the Greeks got the name "kithara", and points out that the earliest Greek kitharas had only 4 strings when they were introduced from abroad. He surmises that the Greeks hellenified the old Persian name for a 4-stringed instrument, "chartar". The earliest stringed instruments known to archaeologists are bowl harps and tanburs. Since prehistory people have made bowl harps using tortoise shells and calabashes as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more gut or silk strings. The world's museums contain many such "harps" from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilisations. Around 2500 - 2000 CE more advanced harps, such as the opulently carved 11-stringed instrument with gold decoration found in Queen Shub-Ad's tomb, started to appear.A tanbur is defined as "a long-necked stringed instrument with a small egg- or pear-shaped body, with an arched or round back, usually with a soundboard of wood or hide, and a long, straight neck". The tanbur probably developed from the bowl harp as the neck was straightened out to allow the string/s to be pressed down to create more notes. Tomb paintings and stone carvings in Egypt testify to the fact that harps and tanburs (together with flutes and percussion instruments) were being played in ensemble 3500 - 4000 years ago.At around the same time that Torres started making his breakthrough fan-braced guitars in Spain, German immigrants to the USA - among them Christian Fredrich Martin - had begun making guitars with X-braced tops. Steel strings first became widely available in around 1900. Steel strings offered the promise of much louder guitars, but the increased tension was too much for the Torres-style fan-braced top. A beefed-up X-brace proved equal to the job, and quickly became the industry standard for the flat-top steel string guitar.

At the end of the 19th century Orville Gibson was building archtop guitars with oval sound holes. He married the steel-string guitar with a body constructed more like a cello, where the bridge exerts no torque on the top, only pressure straight down. This allows the top to vibrate more freely, and thus produce more volume. In the early 1920's designer Lloyd Loar joined Gibson, and refined the archtop "jazz" guitar into its now familiar form with f-holes, floating bridge and cello-type tailpiece.

The electric guitar was born when pickups were added to Hawaiian and "jazz" guitars in the late 1920's, but met with little success before 1936, when Gibson introduced the ES150 model, which Charlie Christian made famous.

With the advent of amplification it became possible to do away with the soundbox altogether. In the late 1930's and early 1940's several actors were experimenting along these lines, and controversy still exists as to whether Les Paul, Leo Fender, Paul Bigsby or O.W. Appleton constructed the very first solid-body guitar. Be that as it may, the solid-body electric guitar was here to stay.

This series will cover a lot of information, and it will be up to you to decide how far you want to take it. I feel that the blues is the style of music that crosses the most musical boundaries so it’s really important for you to get down really well. The stronger you get with playing blues music, the better the rest of your playing will be too, no matter what style you’re playing.