Blues guitar articles & Resources

If you're familiar with blues chords and ready to start trying your hand at some riffs, this exercise from guitar teacher Samuel B. will help you get the ball rolling... Thinking about taking up the blues guitar? Look no further! Here are some fun and easy exercises to get your fingers movin' and your groove goin'.  Whether you're a beginner or an experienced player, these exercises will get your creative juices flowing. So grab your guitar and let's get started!  How Can I Improve M

Learning how to play blues guitar? Pay extra attention to these five things from guitar teacher Mike B.... If you're a blues guitar player, or want to learn how to play the blues, then you'll want to read this post.  In it we're going to reveal 5 secrets that will help make you a better blues guitar player. So let's get started! How Do You Play Blues? Here are a few tips for playing blues: Learn the basic 12-bar blues chord progression Master the tonic chords of E, A, and D

Ready to learn to play blues guitar? This lesson from guitar teacher James W. is the perfect place to start... What is a shuffle, anyway? A shuffle is a rhythm of 8th notes played in triplets, essentially playing 3/4 time over a 4/4 beat to make the music swing. Blues, pop, jazz, and rock musicians all use the shuffle. The blues shuffle is a fun pattern that is simple to absorb into your playing across many genres of music. Think of pop, rock, big band, and blues as being a part of the s

They say you have to have the blues to play the blues. But what if you're blue because you don't know how to play the blues to begin with? Guitar teacher Mike B. has you covered with these five fun, easy licks...  Presented here are 5 easy blues guitar licks that are essential building blocks of a larger blues vocabulary. Before we dig into these licks we need to cover a few basic principles. First, all five of these easy blues guitar licks come out of the minor pentatonic scale. If you d

Ready to get started with learning blues chord progressions? Here's an intro by Austin, TX guitar teacher Samuel B...   In order to properly respect and understand both the theory and structure of ANY kind of American music, it's essential to be able to play the blues. Although the form is said (by some scholars) to have originated in Africa within the story-telling traditions of village griots (historians/poets/musicians who would play a five-stringed instrument known as the halam, which