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Blues Guitar Lessons
(800) 417-4620
Here's an outline of topics your teacher can cover with you depending on your level of ability.
Beginner
- 12 bar blues form
- Blues scale
- Turnarounds
- Standard blues riffs/rhythm guitar playing
- Standard blues lead guitar licks
- Use of metronome in practice
- Importance/development of internal sense of time and form
- Pickstyle blues playing
- Study of intervals (singing and playing)
- Major and minor triads
- Theory and voicings
- I, IV, V dominant 7th chords and chord function
- Importance of blues as original American musical form
Intermediate
- Major Scale harmony and chord function (triads and 7th chords)
- Construction of Dom7th chords
- Dom7th as tonic function chord
- Mixolydian mode and Dom7 chords
- Rhythmic styles (shuffle, straight, 12/8, etc.)
- Blues as a musical language (syntax)
- Lyrical construction of 12 bar blues (A,A,B)
- Importance of learning language by emulating (learning) great recorded solos/songs
- Historical origins of blues song structure
- Historical lineage of blues musicians (chronologically: Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, BB King, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jimi Page, Stevie Ray Vaughn, etc.)
- Historical lineage of blues styles (Delta/acoustic, Chicago, 60s British, contemporary)
- Influence of blues on other guitar styles (Rock [Chuck Berry], Heavy Metal)
- Use of effects in electric blues (earliest uses of distortion, etc.)
Advanced
- Slide blues playing and open tunings associated with slide playing (Delta blues musicians, Duane Allman, Bonnie Raitt)
- Acoustic (Delta) blues and fingerstyle playing
- Influence of blues singers on instrumentalists
- "Vocal" guitar techniques: string bending, vibrato, trills, slides
- Blues phrasing and melodic statements
- Use/importance of space in blues phrasing
- Narrative quality of great blues guitar solos
- Tonic diminished sound in blues
- "Major against minor" contributing to blues sound/feeling
- Ability to hear/sing along with what is played on the instrument
- Fingerings for triads, 7th chords, 7 note scales, diminished scales
- Chord voicings and inversions (especially Dominant 7th/9th/13th)
Related Information
About the Guitar
The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument displaying all the essential features of a guitar being played is a 3300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.

