Online Guitar Lessons

If you want to know how to learn blues guitar, you are first advised to be able to play basic guitar. You will not pick up a guitar and start playing blues from scratch, because you need to understand both how to hold and play your guitar, and also a little about music theory to understand what blues is.

Most guitar teaching methods will teach you the basic of guitar playing, but if you then want to branch out into blues you are generally better to join a guitar membership site so that you can specialize after learning the basics. Most of the teachers on a good guitar website can teach you these basics, some of which we shall discuss in just a moment, and there will also be specialist guitar teachers who will help you to focus on the style of your choice, whether that be rock, jazz, or acoustic, each of which can incorporate the blues into their style of play.

Before thinking of playing in a blues style, you should know the basic pentatonic scale. This is a scale that is very common in most styles of guitar play, and is used in solos in all of the genres. It is of extreme importance that you master the pentatonic scale, since without it you will be like a violinist without a G string!

If you understand anything about music theory, the pentatonic consists of 5 notes that are the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 7th scale degrees from the Natural Minor Scale. There is a reason why they have been chosen, but that doesn’t matter right now: the important thing is that you must learn it. Many of the famous guitar solos you are aware of, such as that in Hotel California, are no more than the pentatonic scale being played up and down the neck, with perhaps one or two slight modifications added.

If you take the pentatonic and add a blues not to it, you have a minor blues scale of 6 notes. Thus, if you take the key of A Minor, the pentatonic notes are A, C, D, E and G. Add b5 or Eb, then you have the blues A Minor scale. This is a very popular scale to use in a blues lick. Blues is practically essential to learn if you want to play rock guitar, because it is the basis of many other rock guitar skills. A good online guitar site will spend a fair bit of time in teaching you the pentatonic scales and also the relevant blues scales.

If you want to improvise your own guitar solos, the blues is the ideal starting place. Both blues and rock styles use the same scales in improvising a lick on stage or off it, and is an essential part of learning to play a guitar. There are many blues techniques that have flowed over into rock, including string bending and vibrato. Vibrato is played by changing a pitch up and down by quickly bending a string using your fingers or wrist. If you use this at the end of phrases it can add dynamism and a beautiful sound effect, but don’t overdo it or it will loss its dramatic effect.

The theory of blues is fairly simple, and it is not difficult to play once you understand it. You might have heard of 12 bar blues, that sounds very complicated, but in the key of A, for instance, a 12 bar blues progression is played using only the three chords A, D and E. Some guitarists will play it as the 7th chords A7, D7 and E7 because they have an overall more ‘bluesy’ feel to them, although the sevenths should really be diminished for a true blues sound.

You will learn all of this when you use an online guitar membership to find out how to learn blues guitar. This is simply a very brief introduction to basic blues guitar, and it is doubtful if a book with or without a CD would enable you to learn blues guitar sufficiently well to use it a range of different genres or guitar styles. Blues is not so much a genre in its own right, but a style or way of playing that you can use in rock, jazz or country.

Basically, blues notes are played at a slightly lower pitch that a major scale note. It is flatter, and by dropping notes down in a scale you make the scale sound sadder, or ‘blue’, and by switching between major and minor notes you get the feel of blues. If you are playing major chords or sevenths on your guitar, then you are not playing blues. However, fit in a few minors and diminish the sevenths, and you will start to get the idea of how to play blues guitar. If your chords have flats in them, such as flattening the VII note, then that is a blues chord.

When looking for ways of how to learn blues guitar, therefore, you should first become adept at the basics and learn the pentatonic scale in various scales, particularly A since it is easy to play a blues in A. Then learn how to fit the blues note into the scale, and from there go on to the blues progressions and shuffles. That is for starters. It’s not difficult, and blues are played using three chords so you have no complicated repetitions.

So, how to learn blues guitar is to find yourself a good online guitar membership site, choose a good teacher that you can get on with and follow fairly easily, then progress to the blues sections of the particular guitar genre you want to specialize in. Understand what blues notes and chords are, and practice. Soon you will be on stage playing all these fabulous blues licks right off the top of your head.

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