How to Play Blues with only One Riff
Without Sounding Boring!
The Blues is one of the most amazing, simple, fun to play style of music on Earth. I am not a blues man but I love blues a lot.
One of the reason why I love Blues so much is that you can say so many things with just few notes. You can play a blues solo with just few notes and still make an impact on your audience.
Blues is about rhythm, intensity, tone, simplicity and dynamics. It will take time before you acquire all these unique characteristic but you are more likely to succeed if you have a system in place to help you with that.
One of the first thing you can work on it’s “Simplicity”. Blues is a very simple music style with a simple structure and today we will focus on getting the structure and simple blues solo ideas in place so that you can start familiarizing with it.
In this fingerstyle guitar lesson, I am going to show you how to play a blues with only one riff (you can also call it phrase/melody) without sounding boring.
I am assuming you know a little bit about the blues structure, if you don’t, don’t worry I will tell you more about it in this post.
The goal is to be able to play a blues solo with just few notes repeated throughout the entire structure.
I am going to give you a very simple formula to spice up the riff at the end of each line so that you don’t have the feeling of playing the same phrase over and over again.
Overall guys, this is an awesome lesson if you are looking to improve your musicality, rhythmic skills and become a better blues player.
One thing really important though! It is really difficult to make this concept easy in just one video and I am sure you’ll have a lot of questions after this video. It’s easy to think about what to do next before you even finish the material I show you in this video. Don’t rush and stick with the stuff I show you in this video for a while before moving on to more complex concepts.
Blues is awesome but the most common mistake guitar players make is to try to learn too many things too fast.
Keep it simple and take it step by step.
Time to go! Let’s get started.
The Video
The Blues Structure
Twelve Bar Blues
One of the first thing you will have to get familiar with is the Blues structure.
In this video we will be working on the twelve bar blues which is probably the most popular (probably the only one) blues structure you will even have to learn.
It goes as follows:
The Dominat 7 Blues Chord
Blues has his own chord, the Dominant 7 chord.
These type of chords sound super bluesy and they are the most important aspect of playing blues. You can’t be bluesy if the chords don’t sound bluesy!
Here you will learn the most simple dominant 7th chord you can play on guitar. You can check it out on the diagram above.
The Blues Scale
Minor Pentatonic
The third element that is vital to make your blues solo awesome is the Pantatonic scale.
The majority of guitar players know this scale (I started improvising using it when I was a little kid).
In this lesson, we will learn just two positions of the A minor Pentatonic scale so that is easy for you to learn the riffs.
Here’s the diagram.
Get the Printable Tab
Check my Patreon Page
Guys I am on Patreon. By becoming one of my Patreon, you will access all the tabs and extra content.
You will also support this channel and help me deliver the most amazing fingerstyle guitar lessons on the web.
We All Start with One Note.
Let me Give you the Right One!
Free Programs!
Create your BlitzGuitar Account and Access three Free Programs for Beginners and Intermediate guitar players.
My Fingerstyle Guitar Courses
Take your Fingerstyle to the Next Level
Here at BlitzGuitar.com you will also find a ton of fingerstyle guitar programs that can really transform your guitar playing.
You can check them out here:
Check out my Fingerstyle Programs
Useful Links
- Guitar Lessons in London
- Strumming Guitar Lessons – Justin Guitar
- Blues Solo
- Electric Guitar Lesson]
