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The Most Commonly Used Lead Pattern
Here is the most popular pattern in guitar soloing. It’s a combination of the G, E, and D shape minor scale patterns. Here’s the pattern as it appears in the key of A minor. You can play the notes from this pattern in songs in the key of A minor and in most cases you…
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Beginner Lead Lesson #1
A lot of blues guitar leads are improvised. That means that they are making up their leads as they go along, right? That’s true to a certain extent, but every good guitar player has a “trick bag” of guitar licks that he/she can pull from at any time. In this beginner blues lead lesson you’ll add several common licks to…
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Beginner Blues Guitar Lead Lesson 2
You should master lesson 1 before you tackle this lesson. This lesson builds from it. In this lesson we’re going to take the scale and licks that we learned in lesson 1 and practice them against a backing track. Backing Track This backing track track is just a standard blues progression in the key of A. This rhythm…
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“Mr. Conductor” by Big Bill Broonzy
Difficulty: Intermediate “Mr. Conductor” is classic fingerstyle acoustic blues. Big Bill Broonzy uses a lot of open strings to provide a bass line to accompany his bouncy rhythm parts. It should be a fun challenge for all you aspiring blues guitarists.
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“Easy Rider” by Blind Lemon Jefferson
Difficulty: Intermediate
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12 Bar Blues Using Major Chords
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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What Is The Blues?
blues (blz) A state of depression or melancholy. Often used with the. 2. A style of music evolved from southern African-American secular songs and usually distinguished by a syncopated 4/4 rhythm, flatted thirds and sevenths, a 12-bar structure, and lyrics in a three-line stanza in which the second line repeats the first: “The blues is an…
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12 Bar Blues With Barre Chords
For those of you who can play barre chords, they will open up a whole myriad of variations of the 12-bar chord pattern for you to try. First, try playing the same progression using the following barre chords at the 5th and 7th frets;
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Add That “Swing” With The Common Shuffle Rhythm
Triplets are used in many styles of music including blues, rock and country. The basic shuffle rhythm is created by leaving out (resting) the middle note of each three-note triplet group. This “triplet” idea allows performers to include triplets in the melody without clashing with any rhythm patterns. Many shuffle rhythm songs are in 12/8 time (sometimes…
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Common Variations of 12 Bar Blues Chord Progressions
The 12-bar blues is one of the most popular chord progressions in popular music, including the blues. The blues progression has a distinctive form in chord structure and duration. It is, at its most basic, based on the I-IV-V chords of a key. The 12 bar blues progression is the foundation of the blues. The…