Guitar Blues Pdf

[Julia Dodoo]

Ihave no idea who the first guitar virtuoso was. If you do, please let me know. But let me submit Blind Blake as a candidate. This guy was an acoustic finger picking wizard. Incredibly technically proficient, yet soulful. A rare combination.

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Many of the blues greats who defined the genre didn't have a huge amount of guitar technique. They didn't necessarily rely on speed or playing a lot of notes for their improvised solos. It was more important to play with "soul", injecting that bluesy feeling into every note.

So let's take a couple of small melodies, called licks or riffs, and try to build on them. Just as a note, I'm going to play these at a literal way and I'm going to give you some music notation to show you how to play them, but we are going to treat them pretty flexibly and change the time and rhythm as well.

Now I can repeat it, add some variations, change some notes, change the rhythm. And here is the second one. And again I'm going to manipulate that lick a lot until it's not even close to resembling the original lick. So I'm going to keep these two ideas as my center. If I get lost, I'll come back to one of those two. Don't be afraid to repeat yourself. It should be easy to repeat the same 5 notes, right? But a lot of people are afraid to repeat it. It can takes them decades to overcome that fear sometimes. Just repeat yourself! If it sounded good once, it'll probably sound good again.

Don't be afraid to be silent, either. When you stop playing, listen to the sound of your own silence. It sounds good! Sometimes the best melody is just a nice stretch of silence. So you can repeat those ideas, add variations, change the notes and change the rhythm. But try to have some ideas that you keep as the center. If you get lost, you can come back to that idea. So I am going to do an example using a C blues backing track.

So don't be afraid to repeat yourself. It should be easy to repeat the same 5 notes, right? But a lot of people are afraid to repeat it. It can takes them decades to overcome that fear sometimes. Just repeat yourself! If it sounded good once, it'll probably sound good again. Practice these motifs, and see if you can come up with your own. Don't be afraid to leave space between the notes and repeat yourself. And most of all, have fun.

The blues began as a unique genre of popular music but is now considered to be the basis of rock and pop. For the purpose of this lesson, the blues will describe a popular chord progression and the scale used to improvise with that chord progression.

The scale most commonly played on this blues is a minor pentatonic scale from the same root as the tonic chord. So this C Blues would be played with a C minor pentatonic scale.

You can also normally use a C major pentatonic scale, and mix it with the minor pentatonic, too. Confused? Check out this lesson for more information about scales to play over a blues progression.

The backing track is 3:00 minutes long and has drums, bass, guitar and piano. The form is as described above. There is a fill in the track at the end of each 12-bar chorus that signals the start of a new repeat.

The i, iv, and v chords will all be minor 7th chords, and are therefore indicated by lower case roman numerals. The V chord will be a dominant 7th chord, which is the same type of chord used for all the chords in the major blues progression. The key of the the chord progression will determine exactly which chords will be used.

Then, just build the chords you need off those root notes using some movable chord shapes. There are many ways you could do these chords, but here are some movable chords I like to use in this type of situation:

You just need to position these chords so that their root notes (indicated by the circle with an R in it) are on the notes I diagrammed above. To do these chords specifically as Am7, Dm7, Em7 and E7, they would be like this:

Blues is a music genre[3] and musical form that originated amongst African-Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s.[2] Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture. The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale, and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or "worried notes"), usually thirds, fifths or sevenths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.

"The Blues" is characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times. It was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the racial discrimination and other challenges experienced by African-Americans.[4]

Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery, with the development of juke joints occurring later. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form called blues rock developed, which blended blues styles with rock music.

The term 'Blues' may have originated from "blue devils", meaning melancholy and sadness. An early use of the term in this sense is in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798).[5] The phrase 'blue devils' may also have been derived from a British usage of the 1600s referring to the "intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal".[6] As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils and came to mean a state of agitation or depression. By the 1800s in the United States, the term "blues" was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase 'blue law', which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday.[6]

In Henry David Thoreau's book Walden, he mentions "the blues" in the chapter reflecting on his time in solitude. He wrote his account of his personal quest in 1845. Though, it wasn't published until 1854. [8]

The phrase "the blues" was written by Charlotte Forten, then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black woman from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she "came home with the blues" because she felt lonesome and pitied herself. She overcame her depression and later noted a number of songs, such as "Poor Rosy", that were popular among the slaves. Although she admitted being unable to describe the manner of singing she heard, Forten wrote that the songs "can't be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit", conditions that have inspired countless blues songs.[9]

Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, when Hart Wand's "Dallas Blues" became the first copyrighted blues composition.[10][11] In lyrics, the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.[12]

Early traditional blues verses often consisted of a single line repeated four times. However, the most common structure of blues lyrics today was established in the first few decades of the 20th century, known as the "AAB" pattern. This structure consists of a line sung over the first four bars, its repetition over the next four, and a longer concluding line over the last bars.[13] This pattern can be heard in some of the first published blues songs, such as "Dallas Blues" (1912) and "Saint Louis Blues" (1914). According to W.C. Handy, the "AAB" pattern was adopted to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times.[14] The lyrics are often sung in a rhythmic talk style rather than a melody, resembling a form of talking blues.

Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative. African-American singers voiced their "personal woes in a world of harsh reality: a lost love, the cruelty of police officers, oppression at the hands of white folk, [and] hard times".[15] This melancholy has led to the suggestion of an Igbo origin for blues, because of the reputation the Igbo had throughout plantations in the Americas for their melancholic music and outlook on life when they were enslaved.[16][17] Other historians have argued that there is little evidence of Sub-Sahelian influence in the blues as "elaborate polyrhythm, percussion on African drums (as opposed to European drums), [and] collective participation" which are characteristic of West-Central African music below the savannah, are conspicuously absent. According to the historian Paul Oliver, "the roots of the blues were not to be found in the coastal and forest regions of Africa. Rather... the blues was rooted in ... the savanna hinterland, from Senegambia through Mali, Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana, Niger, and northern Nigeria". Additionally, ethnomusicologist John Storm Roberts has argued that "The parallels between African savanna-belt string-playing and the techniques of many blues guitarists are remarkable. The big kora of Senegal and Guinea are played in a rhythmic-melodic style that uses constantly changing rhythms, often providing a ground bass overlaid with complex treble patterns, while vocal supplies a third rhythmic layer. Similar techniques can be found in hundreds of blues records".[18]

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