12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 12: Improvising on the 12-bar Form
Learn how to use the form of the 12-bar blues as a roadmap for your improvising and give your blues solo a sense of logic and musical development.
12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 11: Developing Satisfying Solos
Learn to create a solo that has a certain kind of connectedness and unity, because it’s based around some related ideas instead of just whatever lick you happen to come up with at the moment.
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12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 10: Creating Contrast
Space can be good, but if you want to create a bigger sense of dimension, adding in chords as responses to single-note licks can give you a new depth and texture, while creating an additional level of call-and-response.
12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 9: Playing Into the Downbeat
Look at how to play into the downbeat to create momentum in your fingerstyle blues soloing and explore different kinds of resolutions—short, long, and delayed.
12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 8: Adding Motion and Color With Jazz Chords
Explore how you can add motion and color to your blues playing by using compact chord voicings inspired by the great jazz guitarist Freddie Green.
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12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 7: Building Call-and-Response Patterns with Western Swing Chords
Create call-and-response statements using Western swing chords. You’ll learn to play single-note licks on the I chord in the key of A major, answered by different combinations of sixth and ninth chords.
12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 6: Harmonizing a Scale
Learn how to create interesting harmonies derived from a scale—specifically, the ascending form of A melodic minor (A B C D E F# G#).
12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 5: Playing Chords up the Neck
Explore a bunch of different ways of playing E7 and A7 chords up the neck and ways of combining these ideas with single-note licks for a cohesive statement.
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12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 4: Accenting the Backbeats
Learn how to improve your blues playing by accenting the offbeats and keeping rock-steady bass notes, all on a one-chord groove.
12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 3: Accenting the Offbeats
Work on some country-blues patterns and see how emphasizing the backbeat—or beats 2 and 4—improves your blues playing.
12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 2: Creating Rhythmic Contrast
Learn how to use rhythmic contrast in playing blues—mixing up quarter notes, eighth notes, and eighth-note triplets.
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12 Ways to Play Better Blues Guitar – Lesson 1: Syncopation
Explore syncopation—playing around with a melody’s rhythmic placement over the bass notes to make the music sound cooler.