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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)

About the Guitar

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.

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