Solo Blues Guitar Lesson in A (12 Bar Blues Guitar Lesson) – EP127

hey everyone this is Brian from active melded comm well in this week's guitar lesson I'm going to show you how to play a slow blues arrangement in the key of a that's played with just a guitar and a pick you don't need a jam track you don't need another musician all you need is a guitar and you're good to go and this works with an acoustic or an electric guitar and it's a lot of fun to play so we're going to break this down over two videos in this first video we're going to learn the first half if you like to learn the second half and watch that video as well as download the tablature and have access to the on-screen tab viewer you're going to want to go to active melody comm and look for EP 1 to 7 that's a lesson number for this lesson so let's go ahead and get started with part 1 alright so let's talk through tone settings real quick now I'm playing through a boost pedal which boosts the signal gives you a little bit of a break up in your tone not quite as heavy as an overdrive pedal or certainly not as heavy as a fuzz pedal but anyway it got the boost pedal then I'm also playing through a TC electronic flashback pedal which is a little bit of slapback echo and you'll hear me use that on a lot of lessons just sort of fattens up your sound so those are the only two pedals you don't have to have any pedals don't let that be a deterrent just plug straight into your amp or if you've got an acoustic guitar you're good to go with that as well alright so this song is in the key of a and it's just a slow blues and I you know and as I was looking through all the lessons I have I realized I don't have enough of this like the real predictable 12-bar stuff and so there's so much fun to do because you can just literally jam with yourself you don't even need a band and so that's what I'm going to show you how to do in this lesson we're going to learn a lot of these licks and then hopefully you'll be able to improvise and take this and just keep going with it so the first thing that I played was this intro that went and it's just sort of setting the tone is playing the five chord which is an e7 chord and I'm playing it here and I played a little lick part and here's what that looks like so let's learn those notes so I'm starting with my ring finger here on the fifth fret fifth string I'm sliding up to the seventh fret on that fifth string then I come up to the fifth fret fourth string seventh fret fourth string so you see this little box and then we're back up to the fifth fret this time on the third string so now we're gonna walk it back down where we started so it's and I'm just alternate picking that with the right hand down up down up now once we get to that note which is an e note we're gonna hit the low e note which is the open sixth string and then we're going to play an e 7th chord here now the way that I'm doing it is it's kind of the same shape as a d 7th if you know the D 7th is the exact same shape but you're playing it here so your middle finger and your ring finger are both on the seventh fret your middle fingers on the fifth string seventh fret and then your ring fingers on the third string and your pointer fingers here on the sixth fret fifth string I'm just playing strings five four and three now you could add that note to if you wanted to the fifth fret second string but anyway that's how I did it there's our intro and you can hold that out as long as you want the more the longer you hold it the more dramatic it is and then we come into ride into the a part now here's that leg and let me show you that lick and I'll explain where these looks are coming from so you'll start to put this in context so I take my ring finger this time on the fourth the fifth fret fourth string we're going to slide up to the 7th so we're still playing this little box here now watch this our ring finger it lays down so I played the seventh fret fourth string I'm going to lay it down so I can play strings two and three also on the seventh fret so and then watch this then I come down and bar the first three strings on the fifth fret playing strings two and three and then I hammer onto the sixth fret third string and all that's doing if we look at what's happening here is I'm making an a chord you make an a bar chord you're making it here well these are just the top three notes out of that and when you hammer on that note that that's string there it it builds the court it's a lot like the way that a piano player does when they've built chords so there's your intro and then we have that now where are we at so we're in pattern one of the minor pentatonic scale for the key of a if you don't know what I mean when I say pattern one I have a whole blues lead course and I know a lot of your premium members and you have access to that course but I go through all there's five different patterns and this is pattern one and so that's where these licks are coming from they're right out of pattern one for the key of a now after we play this then I come down and hit that open fifth string that's an a note and so that puts us right into the one chord or getting ready to start the cycle and then as soon as I hit that since it's an open string it allows me to take my hand off the fretboard sometimes it's almost like doing a magic trick when you're doing guitar you look for open strings that ring out that allow you to leave where you are and get somewhere else and that's what I did now I come down here and I put my pointer finger on the second fret fourth string so that I can play strings five and four it sounds like that and what that is a power chords it's an a power chord it's just two notes and what we're going to do is we're going to rock back and forth between here and here now I'm using my pinky for that some of you may want to use your ring finger but it's the fourth fret fourth string and that's what we're going to do we're just going to play two of each one two one two and they're just down stroke so watch the right hand and you're not trying to alternate picked it and the reason you want to do those down strokes is it keeps it concise but you can also palm mute here if you don't palm mute and the palm mute is just resting your hand on the strings if I don't do that it sounds like this it just rings out too much so you can see gives it more of a bluesy feel so there's your intro try and get that smooth you can see what I did there if I did slow that down and that'll be the trick to it is making it sound and almost sounds like two guitar players it's like this guy's playing lead this one's playing rhythm but obviously it's you doing both parts okay so now that we're into the the one chord I wanted to alternate it each time I didn't want to just keep coming back and playing although you could do that what what I wanted to do is give you another lick and the other one is a Muddy Waters and you've heard Hendrix use that as well and all I'm doing for that is I'm barring the first two strings here on the fifth fret and I do an upstroke with my right hand and then I take my middle or sorry my ring finger and come down the seventh fret third string and I do a full or not it well mmm it's not a full bin it's sort of a half bin so half n is one fret I do a bend and release and a pull off like that here it is slowly so you do the up stroke down stroke and then after you do the pull off I do a hammer on there to the fifth I'm sorry the seventh fret fourth string and you may want to practice doing that little lick because you'll use it all the time sounds like somebody's singing now once I hit that note I'm back down to the a power chord that we learned and now I'm going to we're just going to alternate now now we're going to go back to that first leg what's nice about this is you got that open a thing going so you watch this it can hit that it's almost like a trick it sounds like I'm down here doing the power chord but I'm not I hit that open a and I can do that little okay so let's so we got the two different licks we M with the intro let's play through it there's a lick one there's the second one we're back to the first one now watch this we're back to the second one this time I'm not going to go back down and play the one chord I'm going to do this little walk up that goes so let's learn that so I start by playing the top part of the a chord right here so you can see that I'm borrowing the first two strings on the fifth fret I'm sorry I'm barring the first three strings so that I can hammer on there to the sixth fret third string now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back and forth between the third string and the one and two string at the same time third string one and two string and then back a third string now there's two ways you can do this the way I'm doing it is hybrid picking if you watch my right hand I'm picking that and then I'm plucking these two fingers the other way you can do it is just with a picking and go down up down and either way is right I've seen players do that and in fact I would do it either way it just depends on the setting but with electric guitar for me the hybrid picking thing is easier there okay so that's the first now what's this now we're going to go back to that d7 chord shape remember D seventh down here well it's the same shape and it's very easy to get to from this a because all you do is you slide your middle finger up to the 7th fret third string your ring finger goes down on the seventh fret first string and then your pointer finger goes down on the sixth fret second string and we're going to do that same pattern three one and two together and then back to three those are the string numbers three one and two three so we have now we're going to walk it up one more you now this last time after that instead of keeping on going which I could have done I came down here and slid into the for cord that way which is a d seventh chord and the way that I'm making that core member in the intro I showed you how to make that a seventh using that d 7th chord shape that we learned that in first position it's that same chord shape there's your eise evans well if you just walk everything down two frets that's a decent the proper way would be to play it that way with this string but a lot of times when i'm playing blues i just hit these three chords because it's got it's kind of low in and it also the reason i do that is that it allows me to give it some vibrato that's hard to do when you have all four fingers on there but if you just have three especially the higher up the neck you go you can actually you know apply vibrato just like having a tremolo and so that's why I choose to just do three strings out of it okay so we have now we're going to come down here and we're going to start that instead of playing the D seventh we're actually going to play a what is that that's a c-sharp I guess so it's the same chord shape but we're starting these two are on the fourth fret and we're going to slide up to the fifth fret now I came up with this little instead of going to the D part which we could have done there I thought it sounded cooler I wanted to do something a little different so I would and what I'd hit for that is after we slid up to this D seventh I kept my pointer finger my ring finger down but I let took my middle finger off and now and I came up here to the fifth fret fourth string now I'm only playing strength of four and three and then take it off and then you can slide everything back into position that's all I'm doing for that and the timing of it is a little bit of something to pay attention to this is playing a little bit ahead of the beat that's playing on the beat now the other thing that I'm doing is I'm using palm muting again for this to give it real kind of a real clicky chunky sound instead of sandwich that that one little change changes the whole dynamic of the thing okay so so I did that twice and then I came back just like we did at the beginning play that leg that's how we get back to the one chord and then we did this again okay now we're going to go to the five chord or the e chord and so watch the timing of this okay so from the a chord you have one two one two one one two one two one and then and then we're going to walk up to the e chord now what's nice about this is very easy to do you're just going back and forth between the second fret and the fourth fret is another little box here and I start with my ring finger on the second fret sixth string I'm going to slide up two frets up to the fourth fret pointer finger goes down on this second fret fifth string now our to the fourth fret on the 5th string and then we're coming all the way up to the 2nd fret 4th string so we have alright so let's take it from the egg and then once I get to this it's an e note and I can play that low you know to the low open sixth string a reason I do that and the reason that a lot of songs that you'll hear the lot of Blues will either be an e or a is for this very reason you have these open strings that allow you to take your hand off the fret board and get into another position I can come up and play something high if I wanted or you know wherever you want to go but you have that opportunity with an open string so you've got that open string ringing out now I'm going to come down and play the e 7th chord here like this now that's we've already learned that that's that you can play it this way or you can add in this extra string this is the e we learned in the intro so I'm making that same chord I've just switched the fingers around so now I'm using these three and I use my pointer finger here on the fifth fret 2nd string 2nd string and play the middle four strings 5 4 3 & 2 and then I slide everything down 1 and then back up 1 so you go from an e to a d sharp or an E flat and then back in position and that's a Robert Johnson thing he will take that 7th chord and slide it like that a lot of times or at least I always think of him when I hear that chord ok so there's that now we've learned a lot of things let me back up and play everything up to this point to put it all in context and then we'll finish out the last of it alright so from the intro we have all right so to get back we play this like and then there's a little turnaround part but so for that let me let me show you that so we're going to be in the minor pentatonic scale for the key of a but we're going to be in pattern two now I'm going to come up and play this leg and what I'm doing is I've got my middle finger down on the 7th or 8th fret sorry 8th fret 2nd string ring fingers down on the ninth fret third string we're just playing those two strings when you slide into them so it sounds like you're playing the slide guitar so it's one two three one two three or triple a triple we do that twice and then watch this so from this we're back down to pattern one key of a minor pentatonic scale I'm going to use my ring finger here on the eighth fret second string and then this finger is right behind it it's already in place in fact you can see my hands just naturally line up just as they would for that pattern so play the eighth fret second string fifth fret second string now watch this sounds fast when you hear it up to tempo but you see all it is is just a slide so I'll go ahead and back it up with the fifth fret third string ring finger here on the eighth fret third string let's play that slide it down one and then do a pull off so you got this is one two three one two three and you're only picking it once then we're back to the seventh fret third string fifth fret third string seventh fret fourth string so and then the last note is the open a string why the open string because look I can take my hands off and go into that final part which is the Robert Johnson thing okay so let's see where would be a good place so from the E all right now we're in position to play this this little turn around and what I'm doing for that is I go my on the fifth fret first string I've got my ring finger down and that stays each time if you listen to this note you're going to hear that a note ring out each time listen it's always there and this is where you will need to use some hybrid picking so let me show you the left hand then we'll get into what the right hand is doing so that that string stays there or that I'm sorry that finger stays there the string of course tazer this stays in position there so my middle finger goes to the fifth fret fourth string and you keep those two in position like that now what you're going to want to do if you watch what the the fourth string does it goes it's just a straight walk down like that and uh and I'm playing that with a pick so the pick is doing down strokes there and you can see I started with a middle finger switched to my pointer finger now while I'm doing that I'm also using my ring finger here with my right hand or some you may want to use your middle finger whatever is easier but to pluck that and hybrid Pickett so you're every time you're hitting that fifth fret first string you're plucking it with a finger so it looks like this with the right hand now I actually played it wrong I guess that when I when I just seem you're not hitting that twice you're just hitting it once sorry about that so we have what you are hitting twice is that this string so you're going and then the last note is you come down here so you string walk down now you come down to the fourth fret I'm sorry second fret fourth string and you played in strings four and one again and that's the open E so and to conclude it the final thing I went right back to that East 7th chord and did the dent that this is down down down up down is the strum pattern and that puts us in position to now play the second half and the second half is a whole new set of licks but that's going to be in the second video so all right let me back up now so if you like this you make sure you check out that second video I've also got the tablature and all of the other goodies that go with this lesson all right so let me go ahead and play through everything slowly and that will conclude this first half so you have this as a reference so here we go all right we'll see you in part two

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 618,137

Keywords: blues guitar lesson, easy, blues, guitar, lesson, lessons, guitar tutorial, learn guitar, blues guitar lessons, simple, easy guitar lesson, Lead Guitar (Musical Instrument), Music Education (Field Of Study), Eric Clapton (Musical Artist), solo guitar, no accompaniment

Id: dSq7tz54CP4

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2015