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Playing Slide On Acoustic
It’s common to use an open tuning to play slide guitar. This allows us to tune so that when we play all the strings open it sounds as a chord. For example, let’s take the open D tuning. Once we’re tuned to open D, a D chord will sound when we play the strings open,…
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Jam Tracks
Practice improvising the blues with these backing tracks. These songs only include the drums, bass, and backing guitar. You provide the lead! TO DOWNLOAD THESE FILES: 1. Hover your mouse pointer over the link. 2. Right-click the link. 3. Choose “Save Link As” 4. You’ll then be prompted to save it. Song Jams: Hoochie Coochie…
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Blues Box Practice Sessions
Working on this page! Beginner Box Practice Session 1
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12 Bare Blues Primer
The vast majority of contemporary blues music is based on what is termed a 12-bar format. That is, the main body of a song follows a set pattern of chords over 12 bars of music that is repeated over and over. Some songs may have several different patterns to give them a bit of variety, but the guts…
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Finding The Key Signature
A Key Signature tells us what originating tone a song is to be performed in. There are 12 tones of equal value. Imagine tones as blocks: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 The distance between each tone is called a half-step interval. Since there are 12 tones in music, there are…
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The Blues Turnaround
The basic turnaround I’m about to show you is a universal generic turnaround and can be applied to many situations. It’s perfect for the beginner, but once you play it a few times you’ll want to add or modify it some to personalize it a little more. When I say it’s generic, I really mean…
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Locating Every The D Note On The Fretboard
Here is a fun and educational exercise. We’ll locate all of the D notes on our guitar and practice playing them. The D notes on each string come out like this: E String – 10th Fret A String – 5th Fret D String – Open G String – 7th Fret B String – 3rd Fret High E…
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Rhythm Trainer (Keeping Better Time)
In this lesson, you’ll discover some of the ways you can improve your rhythm or, in other words, your sense of time. When you’re first starting to learn how to play, common problems arise when you’re playing along with a beat. For example, when trying to strum along with a beat, many tend to drag…
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Alternating Bass In Four Easy Steps
Exercise 1 Getting the hang of playing an alternating bass line while strumming takes a little practice. It’s well worth the effort! In this lesson, we’ll take our first small step towards this goal. Below is the tab for our first alternating bass exercise. Use your thumb to pick each note. You should also count…
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Common Open Chords Recap
Open chords are guitar chords that utilize open strings. They are usually considered the best sounding chords on the guitar. That is because the guitar’s strings sound best when played open. They are also considered the “beginner” chords, because of the relative ease of learning them (as opposed to other chord forms such as barre…