Blues Guitar Chords

This will give you new ideas and you will see how people approach their playing in different ways. You may be familiar with 12 bar blues but everyone has their own different slant towards the way it is played.

Jamming with people will force you to improve you ear for keys and pitch etc and you will be playing ideas which very often will be original and inventive. Jamming helps to try and be interesting and push’s Your ability to greater improvement.

Try and get into the discipline of a regular daily time slot say minimum one hour for guitar practice. Break down that time into segments of practicing different areas. So for example the first ten minutes is warm up exercises which can be chromatic scale patterns covering the guitar neck up and down. At a speed that allows the notes to be played cleanly. Try to increase slowly with accuracy in time.

Then perhaps have a ten minute slot on scales. Try scales in different keys. Ten minutes on scale patterns. This is a interesting aspect of practice. The great thing about patterns is they can be applied to most scales and immediately you have achieved a new type of run which often can sound really interesting. So if you had a pattern for example that you go up four notes in the scale then back three. Start again but at the second note in the scale and go up four notes in the scale then back three. Repeat throughout the scale. Just working out new patterns is time well worth spent in practice.

Get used to the pattern and sequence of the run template and it is surprisingly easy to apply this to a another scale. Though the positioning on the guitar neck is different the pattern is the same. The runs can sound very interesting. An easy way to increase your playing dynamics.

Experiment with holding the pick and the pic or plectrum position in your fingers. Different types of picks will have a change in feel. For example a middle gauge pick with a pointed end is excellent for fast accurate clear sounding runs. Softer gauge works well for acoustic strumming. Also try and experiment where over the pickups you pick or strum. Closer to the bridge will give a more of a treble sound compared to picking over the neck pickup that will give a warmer more mellow sound.

Another useful idea is to try playing with a muted sound. This is achieved by placing the palm of your strumming hand over the guitar bridge. This has the effect of muting the strings and stopping them ringing on or sustaining after the note is played. This can give a very powerful and dynamic effect. Try different areas of the palm with different areas of the bridge. When playing runs or scales it will give a more precise sound where each note is more defined.

Experiment with different gauge strings. Players for example often place the full heavy gauge strings on acoustic guitars, why? Try placing electric gauge strings on an acoustic guitar say size 10′s on the top E string. It is surprising how good the sound can be and it increases the dynamics of the guitar for example proper string bending becomes possible.

String bending is a great part of guitar playing to master. It adds dynamics to your sound and opens up many possibilities of interesting playing techniques, though be prepared it is not at all easy to master and will require a lot of hours of patience practice to master and then some.

Lee Car

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Bob Dylan once used to play acoustic Guitar. It was quite extraordinary when many years ago he appeared on stage with an electric guitar in his hands. The comments came in right away and he made the front page of the big newspapers. Many of his admirers saw an electric guitar as an instrument to play loud rock music. Bob Dylan didn’t care and performed his magic on an electric guitar.

Blues music is a little different. The first Blues notes were played on the acoustic Blues guitar but even the old blues musicians got hold of the electric guitar. I think it’s a sad story because the acoustic blues guitar produced some great blues music.

Back in Chicago in the 1930′s or so there was a movement that was growing. People were enthusiastic when blues musicians from the Mississippi delta area brought their music to the streets and cafes from Chicago. Muddy Waters and Son House were huge stars in Chicago and they would play that acoustic blues guitar until people were just going wild.

The acoustic blues guitar became unpopular when people like Howling Wolf came along and replaced their acoustic guitar by an electric guitar. Wolf and other artists started recording classic acoustic blues guitar hits on electric guitars and that was the music that got out to the people. Soon Son House and the others were relics and Robert Johnson and that famous picture of him and his acoustic blues guitar became treasured pieces of the past.

Jimi Brought It Back For A Little While

For many years the electric guitar ruled the blues world and then Jimi Hendrix decided to record a short movie of himself playing an acoustic blues guitar and for just a little while we got to hear as close to the modern equivalent of those old classics that we will hear. As Jimi fired through Here My Train A Comin’ it was just like being on the delta near the turn of the century when Robert Johnson would travel from small bar to small bar just to make a living playing his guitar. It was a great time that is lost forever.

The acoustic guitar gets its due once in a while on blues and rock records but it will never be a main instrument like it used to be all of those years ago. The sound can never be mistaken and the music played on it was right from the heart and we will never hear music played like that ever again.

Kurt Naulaerts