Basic Blues Shuffle Guitar Lesson | Beginning Blues with Tabs

[Music] hey gang today we are going to continue on our beginning blues series and today we're going to do the most basic of basic blues lessons the basic blue shuffle now this is something that you might hear jimmy reed do in one of his hits like big old boss man or bright lights big city but it's all over the blues and even links into rock as well now i have linked all the beginning blues lessons together into a single playlist below so you might want to check that out if you like this one i've also linked the tab for this lesson down below so you can check that out as well so first i'm going to demo the entire 12 bar blues in a using the shuffle then we'll do the patterns up close and then at the end i'll show you how to avoid some of the pitfalls that people fall into okay keep it nice and simple so first here it is the entire 12 bar blues in a [Music] okay we kept it really simple there so that's the basic 12 bar blues sometimes you'll hear it faster sometimes you'll hear it slower sometimes you'll hear people play with a pick as i just did some people just with their fingers and sometimes you'll hear variants of it like but we're just going to do the really simple one today and we'll cover the patterns up close now again like i said at the end we'll do the pitfalls to avoid all right let's show you the basic patterns that you need in order to play this blues shuffle this basic blue shuffle all right i'll demo it first slow-mo okay that's basically it we're going to start out with the a but before we do i just want to talk a little bit about the techniques to get the right sound so first of all i'm doing what's called palm muting i'm using the flesh of my palm putting that right on the bridge where the saddles meet the strings and muting that bridge a little bit muffling the sound so it sounds a little more like this watch what happens if i don't which is okay it's fine it's just not as common to let those strings and those each of those chords ring out there's a place for it for sure palm muting gives you control over that sound muffles a little bit second thing is i'm using all downstrokes i'm not using down and up so i'm getting a nice strong stroke on all of those chords that i'm hitting so those are two points of technique that i think are kind of important so here's the pattern we're going to start out with the a pattern we're using the a string and the d string only those two strings in this pattern okay so we're going to play a open always and then on d we're going to go from two to four to five back to four and we're going to hit twice every time so it goes like this so two on two then two on four then two on five and two on four again and that's the pattern nothing more than that okay now it may be a little bit of a chop buster if you're a beginner use your pinky on this take your time go very slowly make sure everything is nice and clear you will build up strength of that pinky in order to make this very easy but it'll take time if you haven't done it before okay that's it that's the main pattern now here's the other secret when you go to d the only thing you have to do is go toward the floor one string set so instead of using the strings five and four you'll use four and three or in other words instead of using a and d strings you'll use d and g strings like so same pattern okay and then when you want to go to the e chord instead of going down instead of going toward the floor one set of strings you go up one set of strings and instead of using five and four you use six and five or you use the e string and the a string like so but notice it's the same pattern two four five four two strokes each time let's talk a little bit about a couple of pitfalls i'll give you three of them that can happen and i hear a lot here is the first one the first one is this now you might not even think that that's a pitfall but it can sound a lot better if you do something called palm muting so that just means taking the flesh of your palm and putting it on the bridge near the saddles okay so it mutes the strings a little bit you should hear that right there's a bit of a different tone there it's a little more staccato instead of ringing out right and it gives you more control that way you can get soft and quiet or you can do it loud sometimes you can let loose and emphasize a single phrase or two something like this [Music] you know that kind of thing all right so that's the first one not palm muting so that's easily fixed the second one is kind of like this [Music] no syncopation so it's just kind of straight and people call that straight time what we want here is we want it to be syncopated think of maybe a horse galloping like duh duh duh duh duh yeah so that's the second one is not syncopating or not putting in that little hesitation into the blues and the third one is this and i'm sure you can all appreciate this it's this doctoring their guitar way too much putting on way too much gain now there's a place for gain for sure but in the straight blues we want to keep it as simple as possible we don't want to overpower everybody else so that's a simple one to avoid occasionally when you're playing rock sort of blues or blues rock you want to use a sound like that but generally speaking you want to avoid that to get the best sound so there are three pitfalls to avoid so make sure that you're getting the best sound for you and actually the other people that you're playing with as well alrighty well i hope you enjoyed this really simple blue shuffle if you did please click the like button and subscribe to the channel for more of these and don't forget below is the link to both the tab and the rest of the series if you want to check those out alright till then we'll see you on down the road

Channel: Mark Zabel

Views: 21,824

Keywords: blues shuffle guitar lesson, basic blues guitar lesson, basic blues shuffle guitar lesson, basic blues shuffle, beginning blues guitar, beginning blues guitar lessons, blues shuffle tabs, how to play blues shuffle on guitar, mark zabel, mark zabel guitar, mark zabel blues, jimmy reed blues shuffle, shuffle guitar rhythm, shuffle guitar lesson, guitar shuffle tutorial, guitar shuffle patterns, 12 bar blues pattern guitar

Id: xtxZqk-NbCI

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020