Learn blues guitar riffs and play them in almost any style of music

Lets Look At And Learn Blues Guitar Riffs

You might not want to be the next BB King or Eric Clapton. You might not even want to play a single blues song, ever. So why would you need to learn blues guitar riffs and take a blues guitar lesson? Whether you want to play rock, pop, blues, jazz, country, or folk guitar, here are 3 good reasons why you might want to start out with a blues guitar lesson or two.

The blues forms the basis for thousands upon thousands of songs in all these genres. By learning blues guitar, you’ll have a solid foundation in one of the most common chord progressions.

If you learn to improvise using the blues scale, you’ll be able to solo over almost any song and sound good.

The blues, which evolved out of African-American laments and work songs in the early 20th century, is a simple but very powerful musical form. The influential early country singers Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams both drew on the blues for many of their most enduring songs. Early rock and rollers like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard also borrowed heavily from the blues, as did later rock acts like The Rolling Stones, Cream, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The blues have also crossed over into pop music, and both jazz and folk music draw extensively on blues tradition. As a guitar player, a thorough grounding in the blues will serve you well in almost any genre.

The 12 bar blues is a chord progression that is the foundation for many many blues songs. But it also forms the basis for thousands of rock, pop, country, jazz, and folk tunes. If you learn this one progression, and then learn some simple variations on it, you’ll be able to easily play thousands of songs across all these genres. You can master this progression and the basic variations with just a few blues guitar lessons. From there, you can branch out into whatever kind of music interests you most. Once you have the twelve bar blues mastered, the world of roots based music will be wide open for you.

Blues melodies are based on a five note (pentatonic) scale. If you learn the pentatonic scale, and practice improvising over blues chords using the minor pentatonic scale, you’ll be able to solo over almost any song, even if it’s not blues-based. And if you take the same pentatonic scale and just shift it around a bit, you have a major pentatonic scale, which gives you an entirely different feel. Just by learning this one scale, you’ll suddenly be able to solo over country, rock, pop, jazz… even latin influenced music! Carlos Santana, the great Latino rock guitar player, is known for playing almost exclusively out of pentatonic scales.

I hope I’ve convinced you that no matter what style of guitarist you want to become, if you learn blues guitar riffs that would be a great place to start. What are you waiting for? Go find some online blues guitar lessons and get started!

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