Though blues guitarists are more renowned for their guitar licks and solos than for riffs, good blues guitar players aren’t just able to touch your heart with sweet melodies.
In this lesson we’ll explore the rhythm in the blues with 10 guitar riffs that start from the very easy, and get pretty complex by the end.
For instance, if you can only play up to the third or fourth riff, you can still create simple blues riffs of your own. You will just have fewer options and your riffs will be simple, but you would have started training yourself to create music, as well as putting the techniques you know into practice.
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Before we dig into the 10 easy blues guitar riffs, let’s get clear on some terminology that’s used when playing the blues.
The blues shuffle is a rhythmic pattern where instead of dividing the quarter note (crotchet) beat into two eight notes (quavers), it’s divided into a triplet where the first note is a quarter note and the second an eight note.
Though this rhythmic pattern is used in other genres of music, in the blues it is so common that many songs have an instruction at the top to indicate that all the beats should be divided this way (as you’ll see in the exercises below).
Blues Guitar Licks In Every Position
There are variations to this rhythm. In fact, blues guitar can never be tabbed perfectly since each player has his own nuances of playing the same thing.
These minor differences include holding the first note of each beat of the shuffle for a little longer, or a little shorter, than a quarter note, playing one or both notes as staccato, or putting a rest between the two notes.
For the purposes of this lesson we’ll stick to the example given above, however, keep in mind that in real-life situations, guitar tabs are rarely completely faithful to what blues guitarists play.
Blues Licks To Spice Up Your Guitar Solos
These are usually played as either power chords (ex A5, D5, and E5 in the key of A) or as dominant 7th chords (A7, D7, E7), as well as minor, usually with an added 7
Note: If you’re learning music theory this may confuse you since there is no key that has all these three dominant 7
Chords in it. The reason for this is simple: Music theory describes what has been tried and tested by the great composers before us and found to work, not a set of rules.
Great Blues Guitar Chords To Learn
Many musicians deviate from these patterns and create their own. It is very common for the blues to deviate from traditional music theory norms. In fact, one can say that the blues has its own theory.
The next riff is slightly more complex because it makes use of string skipping technique, which simply means playing notes that do not fall on adjacent strings.
The first and third beats in each bar are made of the power chord while the second and fourth beats are made of intervals of a major 6th.
Ways To Play Better Blues Guitar — Lesson 5: Playing Chords Up The Neck
This riff is almost identical to riff number 4, except that we start on note A on the fifth fret of the low E string, rather than on an open string.
Aside from the stretching exercise in itself, being able to play beyond the open position when playing double stops or chords opens up a lot of possibilities, including the ability to play in all keys.
The next riff introduces the interval of a minor seventh. This means more stretching, as well as more options under your belt when creating your own blues guitar riffs.
Blues Guitar For Dummies
All the riffs we’ve explored so far are somewhat stereotypical, stuff that has been repeated over and over again with minor variations.
The note C sounds jarring with the underlying chord, which is A7, thus made of the notes A, C#, E, and G.
However, it is only used as a passing note to the chord tone C#. This way of resolving dissonance is very common in the blues.
Easy Blues Songs To Learn On Guitar
Note that some bars sound more like blues guitar licks, than riffs. The reason is that there isn’t a huge difference between licks and riffs except that riffs are meant to be repeated while licks are not.
Though licks are usually played on the higher strings of the guitar, and riffs on the lower strings, this is not what really defines them. Thus a group of notes played on the higher strings but meant to be repeated can be considered a riff.
You may consider giving a donation, by which you will be helping a songwriter achieve his dreams. Each contribution, no matter how small, will make a difference.Some guitarists will tell you the blues is easy to play, which is both kind of true and incredibly false. Technically, you don’t need to be a lightning-speed shredder to play those sweet pentatonic bends. Harmonically, most blues chord progressions are more or less identical and pretty basic. But the blues is an idiom, a language that requires a thorough study to be played properly. It’s not just about playing random notes from the scale over a 12-bar blues: it takes time and passion. We have created those 20 licks with passion, so now it’s your turn to put the time in!
Of The Best Modern Blues Riffs
Play the greatest blues standards with the Play Guitar Hits app. Learn at your own pace and level with two-handed videos and interactive sheet music.
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Easy Guitar Riffs For Beginners
The blues has a very rich history, one that has defined the musical evolution of the 20th century. Rock directly came from the blues (to the point that the line between those two genres is blurry at best), but hip-hop and R’n’B (rhythm n’ blues, right?) also come from that tradition. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a popular genre of music that emerged during the last 100 years that does not owe anything to the blues.
Even though there are countless blues currents and trends, three of them tend to stand out as milestones in the development of the style. Delta Blues started out in the Mississippi Delta (hence the name) in the early 1900s, starting with legends like Charley Patton and Son House. Delta Blues artists would usually sing and play at the same time without any other musicians to back them up, rarely playing solos as we envision them today, and often singing on simple one-chord structures. Monsters like Leadbelly, Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson have defined the shape of blues and rock to come, including writing a lot of future standards, but as guitar players, they had a very complex style that has not really been imitated.
Chicago Blues on the other hand is the era that defined a lot of blues rules and conventions that we take for granted nowadays. African-American artists moved from rural Mississippi to the industrial North, and especially Chicago, looking for a better life, including a proper job and no institutional segregation.
Jazz Blues Guitar Licks & Solos
Muddy Waters was one of the pioneers of Chicago Blues on the Chess Label in the early 1950s, and his electric style backed by bass, drums and piano has become a gold standard of sorts.
The brits pickup up on those Chess singles, and they created their own version of the blues, a stiffer, more aggressive take on the genre with an emphasis on guitar solos. All the guitar greats of the sixties have cut their teeth as part of the British Blues Boom, including Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.
As time went on, the blues started to mix with rock to the point that those two have become very close, and many artists have been walking that fine line between the two. Any guitar hero worth his salt knows the blues, and they all have learnt their craft by stealing riffs from Clapton’s early work, from Duane Allman to Van Halen. Now is the time to start your own blues education with the help of those twenty licks inspired by ten blues legends. Each guitarist has inspired two different phrases, an easier one and another one that will require a little more work.
Rocking The Blues
They are as close to a cliché dictionary of the genre, filled with great ideas that you can use as starting points to develop your own take. You have probably heard of the 12-bar I-IV-V structure by now (and if not you should definitely look into it), and the second lick for every artist works over the end of that structure when the backing tracks go from V to IV then back to the I. The first lick has a single static chord in the background, which makes it usable in a variety of situations.
Since blues is at its core an oral-based tradition, all the nuances and fine expressive points of those licks cannot be fully covered by a simple
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