Basic 12-Bar Blues Riff

For this basic blues riff, there is quite a bit of stretching involved, so don’t feel bad if you don’t get the hang of it right away. It will take some work to get comfortable with stretching that far. What we’re going to do is outline the chords throughout the 12-bar blues progression with this riff, and apply a shuffle rhythm. We’re also going to use a muting technique to give your playing a more bluesy style.

Let’s jump right into this riff. In our 12-bar blues progression, the first four measures are over the 1 chord, so we’ll learn the riff that goes over this chord. Start with an E power chord and play that twice with two eighth notes, using a swing feel. Next, leaving your index finger where it is, place your third finger on the fourth fret of the A string and play that twice using two swung eighth notes. This is basically the entire riff, you’re just going to repeat it over again.

This has taken up only two beats so far, so to get a whole measure, we need to play this riff twice. Since we have four measures of the 1 chord, we’ll need to play this short riff eight times in a row.

The 12-bar blues progression switches to the 4 chord for two measures next. For this riff, we’ll make an A power chord by placing your index finger on the second fret of the D string, and play the fifth and fourth strings twice using two swing eighth notes. Keeping your index finger in place, come down with your third finger on the fourth fret of the D string, and play that twice using two swung eighth notes. This will be your basic riff over the A chord.

Now here comes the stretching part that I mentioned earlier. When you go to the 5 chord, which is a B, we’re going to have to make a B power chord. Because of the stretch in it, we have to make it with our first and second fingers rather than first and third fingers. Place your first finger on the second fret of the A string and your second finger on the fourth fret of the D string. Play this for two swung eighth notes. Now you have to stretch your fourth finger all the way to sixth fret and play the A and D strings for two swung eighth notes. This may take you a while to get that stretch down.

Now we have a measure of the 4 chord, so head back to your A riff and play it for one measure. After that, go back to the 1 chord for one measure. Finally we end of the 5 chord for one measure, so make the B power chord shape again and stretch your pinky out to play that B riff for one measure.

Now that we’ve walked through this riff, take a look at the video to hear what it will sound like with the jam track. This is the basic 12-bar blues riff we’re going to learn altogether in the context of some real music.

 Now that you’ve learned this simple 12-bar blues riff, you can really hear how it livens up your rhythm blues playing and gives it some forward momentum. This is the most basic version of this rhythm riff that we’ll learn, and it’s important to get it down because it’s the foundation of another version of the riff we’ll learn later.

Slow this riff down and practice it as much as you need to until you feel really comfortable with it, then you can pull up a jam track. Try playing along to either the 70 beats per minute or the 100 beats per minute jam track.
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.