Oct/090
Blues Guitar Riffs - Check Out This Site!
Ok guys, if you're looking for some cool blues guitar riffs you HAVE to check out this site I found. I'm always on the lookout for cool blues guitar stuff on the web and if I'm honest, most of the stuff available is aimed at beginners. I stumbled upon, (strangely enough it was actually through the website StumpleUpon.com) a website called...
www.UltimateBluesBackingTracks.com
They have a whole catalogue of blues backing tracks you can download and the cool thing is, the tracks all come with a bunch of blues guitar riffs and if you get the whole package you get a 10 week guitar course and a pentatonic scale 'mastery' course for free! Just what the doctor ordered!
I'm the kinda guy that has a massive collection of guitar magazines and about a million blues backing tracks. The trouble is, most of them sound kinda fake but these ones sound AWESOME! It says on the site that all the tracks were recorded by a real blues band and you can really hear it. I always jam along with them nice and loud and it sounds just like I'm playing with a live band.
I downloaded all 50 of the tracks and had a good look through the pentatonic mastery guide. It's really, really good stuff! It teaches you all of the scale shapes for the pentatonic and the blues scale and goes through some signature licks of some cool players like Clapton, Gilmour, BB King, SRV etc. Then I had a good read through of the 10 week guitar course and whoa, talk about go into the details! You get a bunch of lessons that are broken down into different areas like, Speed Exercises, Scales, Chords, Theory so with each lesson you're learning a bit about all the key areas you need to focus on to get better. I'm gonna adapt my own teaching materials for my guitar students to follow this method because it's arranged on the page so well, it's really easy to follow.
I'm really glad I gave the site a try, not only are the blues backing tracks AWESOME! Try getting bored with 50 different tracks to play along to! The sheer amount of tuition material you get with it, more than 500 blues licks and the extra free guitar courses totally make this a worth your while! The tracks are all really inexpensive and the amount of them means you have new stuff to play around with every time you practice. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is the best system I've found for learning blues guitar. Go get involved!
Click here for the best blues backing tracks
See you next time!
Johnny
Oct/090
Blues Guitar Riffs - The Next Step
Ok, so we talked about the pentatonic scale last time round, now be aware that there are actually 5 different shapes for that scale which we'll go into later, but for now it's just that one shape I want you to get your teeth into. There are so many blues guitar riffs that are based upon that one shape that if I had a dollar for every one I'd be the richest man on the planet. That's why it's so important for you to learn, because it's used so much!
Moving on, you've probably heard of THE BLUES SCALE many times, this is actually the next step on from learning the pentatonic scale. The great thing about it is, it's pretty much the same thing with just one note added! It doesn't get any simpler than that. You'll notice when you play this through that that one extra note really gives the scale a much more bluesy tone.
So here it is...
Notice that extra note appears twice, it's not two separate notes it's the same one occuring twice within the pattern. Again there's been a million blues guitar riffs played with this pattern too, so make sure you get this one under your fingers before we go any further!
If you have any blues backing tracks to play with try practicing the two scale shapes we've learned so far over the top of it, you'll get a much better idea of the sound of each scale that way.
See you next time
Johnny
Sep/090
Blues Guitar Riffs - LEARN THIS FIRST!
Ok guys,
So something that I always tell my guitar students is this; You must always have an understanding of everything you learn. There's absolutely no point in learning ANYTHING on the guitar unless you know why whatever it is you've learned works. For example you might have just learned to play an awesome BB King style blues guitar riff but if you don't know what scale he used to play it you haven't really moved forward with your playing as much as you could have.
The best way to improve your guitar playing is learn the mechanics behind everything you learn, that way you'll be able to absorb everything and incorporate it into your playing so you start to build your own style. That's the holy grail of guitar right there.
So before we go any further and actually start learning any blues guitar riffs we're gonna learn this scale here. It's arguably the most widely used guitar scale of them all so make sure you commit it to memory asap!
Ok fellas, get practicing and come back next time for the next installment from yours truly.
See you next time
Johnny
Sep/090
Blues Guitar Riffs - Hey Guys!
Hi Guys,
I just thought I'd introduce myself, my name's Johnny and I'm a guitar player and tutor from Chicago. I've been thinking about setting up a blues guitar riffs website for a while now and now here it is. I'll be posting new stuff every few days including lessons, riffs, licks and much more, so make sure you keep coming back.
See you next time!
Johnny