Learn How to Play Blues Guitar Like a Pro

There are such a wide variety of methods to learn to play guitar, but learning how to play blues guitar still holds a lot of appeal to many people.  Even styles of guitar such as rock and metal still learn many of the same musical concepts that can be found in many blues guitar lessons.  While those styles may sound quite different, the emphasis on expressiveness and lead focus still remain intact in the work of many musicians.

Rhythm Blues Guitar

Rhythm parts are usually less emphasized in blues style of guitar, though many blues rock guitarists do place more musical importance on it.  That isn’t to say these parts aren’t important to the song as a whole, merely that these parts usually are placed primarily to give a background for the lead parts to be placed upon.

For the most part, chord progressions are based on the twelve bar blues structure.  However, this is not necessarily required and there are some other structures which are now more obscure, and sometimes chord changes were completely arbitrary usually among older blues guitarists though less commonly seen in the styles presented in blues guitar lessons.  Usually only the perfect interval chords are used in a progression (I, IV, and V), but sometimes other chords can pop up.

What actually goes into the particular rhythm bars isn’t anything inherent to how to play blues guitar.  Almost any technique which pops up for someone learning to play guitar could potentially be used, as long as the tonality is preserved.  These might be chords, repeated riffs, or blues shuffle lines, the important thing is to provide a background for the lead part.

Lead Blues Guitar

Easily the more interesting part to play in blues guitar, this is what most people think of when thinking of a blues guitarist.  This style of lead is far less intensive from a musical theory standpoint, generally favoring the minor pentatonic or blues scale, and rarely, if ever, using key changes.  That aspect of the style makes it easier to gloss over that aspect of playing, which is far less practical for a jazz or classical guitarist to do so.

Rather than focusing on complex musicality, blues lead guitar focuses on expressiveness more than anything else.  The style is deceptively simple from a theory standpoint, but focuses heavily on more technical aspects of playing, such as bending and vibrato.  A blues guitarist spends more effort embellishing notes to get a point across than anything else.  These types of technical skills are the most important focus to look for in a blues guitar lesson when focusing on this style.  The method as to how to play blues guitar revolves around more expressive technical abilities.

While there are a lot of concepts out there of methods to learn to play guitar, it is important to realize what is important to the style.  An aspiring blues guitarist should devote their efforts to control of expressive techniques over more complex theory constructs.  That isn’t to say those theory elements can’t be incorporated into a blues lead, merely that those elements are difficult to add and still sound bluesy.  Blues guitarists usually pull the most out of a few notes, and using the minor pentatonic effectively is integral to this style.  When delving deeper into this style, bear in mind what appeals about this style in order to know where to best focus practice efforts.