Blues Boogie Woogie Composition that you can play by yourself on guitar - Blues Guitar Lesson EP284

[Music] hi this is Brian with active melody comm in this week's guitar lesson you're gonna learn how to play a really cool boogie-woogie style blues shuffle that works on an acoustic or electric guitar and you're playing this by yourself you don't need any jam track or any accompaniment just grab whatever guitar you've got and follow along I'm going to explain where all the notes come from so that they make sense to you you're not just memorizing something but you're understanding it so that you can start to use all of these licks when you improvise I've got this lesson split into two parts in this video we'll take a look at the first half if you'd like to watch the second half and get the tablature and access the on-screen tab viewer for this lesson you're going to want to go to active melody comm go to the weekly lessons page and do a search for EP two eight four alright so let's talk about the song structure for this will talk about the chords that are used the song is played in the key of E and it's pretty much a one four five chord progression your E chord your a chord your B chord all of the chords that we're familiar with when it comes to playing one four five twelve bar blues there is one chord however which is the F sharp 7 chord the F sharp dominant seven chord that's gonna be your two chord and that's a major two chord now typically in them if we're following the major scale and what each chord should be in the major scale the two chord is typically a minor chord but we're gonna make it a major chord when we play it now we're not gonna get to that just yet I'm just letting you know that there's that F sharp chord that's thrown in there as well and that you hear that it'll in like ragtime blues and stuff that just kind of colors the music in a different way and gives you a little more variety okay so let's start with the intro so the song starts with this intro that I only play once and I never come back to it it goes like this so let's start with just that part of it now what's really cool about this is we're going from the major pentatonic scale its major see how it sounds happy and then the second time I didn't quite go all the way to the major pentatonic I went into the minor pentatonic that's more sad or blues bluesy or serious and I'm fascinated by just changing that one note it can pull this in a different direction so I want you to remember these licks these notes that we're gonna play and how they connect back to this chord shape let me show you how to play them first and then I'll help you connect these dots so with the right hand we're gonna be playing alternate picking down up down up down up so it starts with a down stroke and we're starting on the second string which is the open B string and then we go right into a hammer on there which is the second fret second string and then an upstroke on the one string of the e string so we have and then I'm gonna take my middle finger I'm doing all of this by the way this intro with just my middle finger so far on the on the left hand there and then we're gonna slide from the second fret to the fourth fret on the first string we're gonna play one two three four five with the right hand so let's analyze just that just those few notes that we've learned and how they connect back to this e chord shape remember we're playing the song the key of e so if I took this Ecore now and look at those notes that we've learned you can you can start to make music out of just a few notes [Music] you know I'm just taking those notes that we've just learned and I can already start to pull a melody out of it so don't think that you have to learn all these scales and you have to get super you know involved in theory and you know just blowing blowing your mind to be able to make music it's music can be very simple and and the best stuff always is at its root it's very pure and very simple so just keep that in mind as you're trying to improvise or write your own stuff okay so we have now the second time through I did the same thing same pulse start oh but then I only slit up to this third fret on the first string again I'm only using my middle finger so far with the left hand all right now the cords underneath that then 1/4 to be you know the first one would be your import the second when we come here I can either be the e diminished seven or it could be the a7 either of those chords have that note in it so just keep that in mind if you were to be playing this with a friend and you want to know what chord to play under neath it you can play either of those chords and I put that in the tablature as well all right so yeah now the third time I went so let's get that so it starts the same way slide up to the fourth friend just like we've done then we're gonna play the open one string and then we're gonna come to the second fret second string and then we're gonna play the open second string so these are notes that we've already played we're just putting them in a different order now so we and then we're gonna play that open one string again you can see I'm still just milking these just these you know five notes here and just putting them in different orders but I'm getting different feel out of them so from the beginning with and then after that I want same thing as we did in the intro the hammer onto the second fret and then the open one string and then there's this little bluesy thing that goes so that's going into minor pentatonic skill I'm sliding from pattern one to pattern two pattern to right there so I'm on the I'm starting that on the the third string I'm using my middle finger second fret sliding up from the second fret to the fourth fret then my index finger goes down on the third fret second string okay so from the beginning [Music] and then I slip from the fourth fret back to the second fret open third string hammer on to the first fret third string and then it loved stroke on strings 1 & 2 or string 1 either either those but it's just an upstroke right grabbing the top part of the equal so notice my left hand goes ahead and makes the full ecord just does that by default because that way I can play when I'm doing my upstroke I don't just have to limit myself to the top strings and hit the whole chord if I want all right so that's the whole intro then and then we go into the 4 chord it goes the song starts kind of stuck that's all I set up to get us to the 4 chord and that's what we're gonna learn first now what I'm doing with my left hand is I'm going ahead and making barring the first four strings on the second fret I'm keeping that fifth string open though because that's your a string remember your AE is your four chord and I've got a shuffle going with the right hand in fact I've got a shuffle going through this entire thing even for the intro part we're not playing it on the beat like this 1 2 3 4 5 6 not robotic it's 1 2 3 4 5 so it's got a little bit of a swagger to it and you keep that swagger through the whole thing that's what gives you the blues when you're playing that kind of boogie-woogie sounds like a the old boogie woogie piano line and everything it's not if you play it on the beat it totally loses the Mojo it's the boom that's swagger that's what you got to work on with the right hand dot and all you're doing is you're accenting the down stroke that you're hitting it a little harder than the upstroke and it actually becomes fairly easy to do once you get used to it okay we're part of the first four strings on the second fret we're starting on the open fifth string we're gonna go down up and then my middle finger goes down on the third fret third third fret fifth string and then ring finger goes down on the fourth fret fifth string so we and then we're gonna play the fourth string and then we're gonna come up here and play the fourth fret fourth string now notice this bar here on the second fret stays down the whole time and then there's an upstroke on the third string again behind this bar here Boogie's tennis standard boogie-woogie blues and a right there and then we go right back down to the bottom where we started which is that open fifth string and play play it again just up to there up to that fourth string and then away so that's the ring finger on the fourth fret fourth string and then release it and do an upstroke which is behind the bar there so let's play that whole a party [Music] now that's awesome right there I'm telling you if you learn nothing else if this entire composition is too difficult or too boring or whatever this piece is worth its weight in gold because now as a rhythm player you can play this fast you can play it slow you can put it to whatever feel you want I use that all the time it works in country it works in blues it works in rock it's very very useful and what's cool as as we're about to go to the one chord now we're gonna do the same thing we're just gonna take our finger and move it up one more string still on the same fret so on the second fret but now we're barring the first four strings first five strings rather on the second fret and we're gonna go so we're playing the same shuffle same boogie-woogie thing but now we've just started on the sixth string instead of the fifth string everything else is the same alright let me pause there and take it from the intro all the way up to that point [Applause] [Music] all right pretty cool you can start to see it coming together and once I hit that low six string again I played this [Music] and that's kind of like a little hiccup that happens in the rhythm so it's just that open sixth string and then I let my finger which is already barring there anyway go ahead and hit strings four three and two do a hammer on open third string hammer onto the first fret and then the upstroke there which is hitting the top it's just the top part of your E chord so and I use that little hiccup all the time when I'm playing an E I mean I use it every pretty much every time I'm playing any kind of rhythm and [Music] it's just very useful and you can you hear piano players using that same technique and just about every blues guy will do that at some point okay so now this is where the song would switch if we were playing a rhythm guitar we would be playing that F sharp seven chord there but I'm not playing the chord I'm just gonna keep that boogie-woogie feel going and so what I ended up playing was like a walking bass line exactly what I would hear a bass player doing [Music] pretty cool you're just walking from all the way from that F sharp note which is in the two chord the major two chord that I explained we're walking it all the way up and then all the way back down so we're going from the second fret to the fourth fret on the sixth string the open fifth string 1st fret on the 5th string then we're gonna play the 2nd fret fifth string fourth fret fifth string I'm going to show you the notes first and then help you understand how to think about it open 4th string 1st fret 4th string and now we're gonna walk it back down so that's the top of the hill which is that's the second fret now on the fourth string now we're gonna go open 4th string come down to the 5th string and play the 4th fret third fret second fret all in the fifth string open fifth string fourth fret sixth string second fret sixth string down to your open sixth string that's a lot of notes now when you're playing them you're not going to play them one at a time you're going to do two of each down up down up down up so there's two of each one of those notes [Music] [Laughter] now that is awesome practice material there to get that shuffle down trying to lock in on a single string like that and play the shuffle of one fret at a time like that as you walk up and walk down going across strings it's a great way to practice that so that would be a good way to practice putting on a metronome the other thing I'm doing is I'm using a little bit of palm muting you don't have to do that but it gives it a little fatter sound sounds more like a bass player alright so let's go over that bass walk up one more time it starts here on the F sharp note [Music] [Laughter] okay now once we get to there once we get back down to the e note then what I played was a different rhythm pattern it's keeping the same tempo but I just mixed up the rhythm it's got kind of a John Lee Hooker thing going on there that's what it sounds like to me are kind of where my head goes when I hear that or feel that I guess as I was coming up with it I ended up playing it eight times so this is where I'm out of the typical format but because it for just seemed too short as I was doing it it's like we've gone to this new part in the song and it seemed like it needed to hang out there for a little while so that's why there's eight of those that's one that's two so forth so it goes eight times now let me show you how to play this this is an awesome awesome take away because it's another rhythm style that you can learn and use when you play and you can play this over any chord anywhere on the neck we're gonna learn it over an e first and with the left hand we're just gonna make an E chord but with the right hand we're gonna start by playing down up down up like this that's the first thing we learned so it's just down so we're playing the bottom part of that ecord so just the bottom strings of the chord not the full chord just down up mute it down and then up so just get that far first and that's pretty easy you should be able to do that even if you have to do it slowly that's okay so we ended on an upstroke right now to conclude this rhythm part we're gonna play up down up after that so we're gonna go and now look at the left hand what's happening we're gonna play the E chord which is we've already were on and then when we do the down I'm gonna play I'm gonna go ahead bar here so I'm playing an a chord actually hitting just kind of the middle strings there four three two and then I'm gonna take my hand off the fretboard and do another upstroke but play strings two three and four I'm gonna try and hit those strings if I can only play strings three and four that's okay too you're just hitting those notes now that sounds wrong and totally out of key and everything if you just hear it on its own but when you're playing it up to tempo it's really more of a percussive thing than anything so even if you're playing it in a different key you could still hit those open strings just quickly there so that your hand can get in position but you're filling the notes you're filling the space with something and that's that rhythm of the notes there all right so the second time through again is up down so let's put the two together now we have down muted down [Music] so you can see it's already starting to come together now and I use that all the time if I'm planning the KB you could do this in the key mg or any key if you think about these three fingers making that ecord shape I'm just moving it up [Music] so you can start to use that that rhythm style and it works whether you're playing something really slow or really fast you get into the kind of that zydeco feel or you know however you want to look at it or if you're playing really slow [Music] throwing some Felix alright so you can start to see how useful that little rhythm pattern can be now I also threw in just to give it a little variety or shake things up in this one place oh it did that same thing that we used in the intro is that it's the second string open second string a hammer onto the second fret and then an upstroke on the one string so I do that in the middle of it let me play this entire rhythm now with that little extra lick in there and you'll see where it fits in so it goes like this [Music] right there was a disease [Music] and then I stopped and go into this whole second part now we're gonna end this part one video there I think that's a good stopping place we've covered a lot of material already and you've got a lot of great takeaways now if you're a Premium Member you know that you have access to the tablature the on-screen tab viewer the part 2 video and obviously all of those things help you to be able to learn this easier if you're not a Premium Member you can at least follow along with the first half there and just write down everything that you need to do to be able to play this and use it when you improvise so let me back up and play through this entire first half up to that point one more time I'll go through it slowly and then I'll see you in part 2 so we can learn the rest of this now here we go [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 1,439,197

Keywords: blues guitar lesson, blues guitar tutorial, learn blues guitar, boogie woogie guitar lesson, boogie woogie guitar, boogie woogie blues guitar, how to play guitar, how to improvise on guitar, guitar lesson, guitar lessons, music education, blues guitar education, blues guitar, how to jam on guitar, play guitar by yourself

Id: DYq8os4toSM

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2018