Guitar Noise

Welcome to the first of a new series of articles entitled Into the Blue, which will explore the style, sound and key players within the Blues genre. This series will be pitched at an intermediate level and will build on techniques and practices that many players will be well aware of. But, of course, we’ll still start off slowly, making sure we leave nothing to chance.

It’s always a pleasure to get a new lesson from Peter Simms! His latest piece involves putting a walking bass line underneath a standard jazz blues progression. When you put it all together, you’ll definitely think it was worth the extra practice!

Arjen has an ambitious project for the New Year - a series of pieces on improvisation. This first lesson introduces the form of the twelve bar blues, the minor pentatonic scale and the blues scale. There are exercises and even some MIDI backing tracks that you can practice along with!

Here’s a terrific introduction to the wonders of acoustic blues, using the Muddy Waters’ classic You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had. First time GN contributor Jim Arkuszewski will get you playing the blues in no time.

Alan Green’s latest piece walks you through a traditional blues turnaround, all done in a great fingerstyle. Alan has also been kind enough to furnish some MP3s to aid you with this lesson.

Jazz and blues have always been intertwined. In part two of this three-part series, Hans explores the relationships between the major and minor blues scales. Definitely a lot of fun!

Here is a great introduction to the Mixolydian scale - how to find it, how to use it. It’s great for blues, rock and a host of other things and, as always, Darrin makes learning it a joy and not a chore.

Jazz and blues have always been intertwined. Now you can see how simple blues lines can add to your jazz improvisational skills, as well as other styles. Hans is back with the first of a three-part series that will sharpen your playing considerably.

Let’s practice the blues with this simple Study in Blue. We’ll use only three chords for this simple twelve-bar blues song in the key of E major.

The blues offers a great opportunity to practice playing triads and further our understanding of chords. This is a hands on music theory for guitar lesson.

We’re going to take this old blues standard and use it to learn three important things: the turnaround, the blues lead scale and the grand finale.

We’ll take this Chuck Berry classic to further our understanding of the 12 bar blues pattern. This is the second part of our three part look at the blues.

We’re going to take this three chord blues song and use it to learn the twelve bar blues. We’ll add a little theory so you can play any blues song in any key.

There is a not so subtle connection between the origin of the pentatonic scale and blues music.

There are a few different claims to the origin of the slide guitar. But whatever they are, slide guitar is forever associated with the sound of blues music.

What sort of things can you use to play slide guitar? Here are some ideas and a collection of tips to make your slide playing sound better.