Before You Accuse Me – The Blues – Part 1: Structure and Shuffle
We’re going to learn the twelve bar blues using a three chord blues song. We’ll also show you how we did it so you can play any blues song in any key.
The twelve-bar blues is one of the most important chord progressions for a beginning guitarist to learn. It is an essential part of most blues and rock music that a guitarist will play.
We’re going to learn the twelve bar blues using a three chord blues song. We’ll also show you how we did it so you can play any blues song in any key.
Nick Minnion provides a short video lesson to help beginners add riffs taken from the blues scale into their playing.
Knowing the basic structure of the twelve bar blues will help you immensely as both a guitarist and a musician, particularly if you want to play and jam with other musicians. Here’s a guide to explain how it works.
Diatonic Chords are chords formed using only the notes in a single major scale. Knowing the diatonic chords of whatever key in which you’re playing a song can help you in more ways than you might dream possible!
Here’s a very cool single-guitar finger style instrumental blues piece that will teach you about driving, single note bass lines and creating cool melody lines and fills.
Peter Simms has written a little ditty that shows us how to make your single guitar sound like a small combo band. We’re going to focus on fingerstyle with a melody, bassline and chords.
It only takes a single note to change the minor pentatonic scale into the “blues scale.” And what a world of difference that one note can make! As in the previous lessons in this series, we’ll provide you with MP3 sound files in order to help you create your own solos.
Last time out we sampled the different flavors the major and minor pentatonic scales offered us as tools for soloing over blues progressions. While each had its owns merits, we can create an even more tasteful (not to mention useful) solo when we combine the major scale with the blue note elements of its own minor pentatonic. Come listen!
While it’s vital to use a chord progression to help you decide on a scale, knowing the style or feel of both a song and a scale is just as important. This lesson focuses on the minor pentatonic scale and why it is used so much for blues (and other genres) in major keys.