Unplugged Blues Guitar Lesson - Acoustic Blues Guitar Tutorial - EP303

[Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi this is Brian with active melody comm well a few days ago eric clapton celebrated his 74th birthday and somebody had emailed me saying you should create a lesson in honor of his birthday and I thought about it and thought it's not a bad idea it's been a while since I've done a lesson in his style and I don't think I've ever specifically covered his acoustic playing he's got so much cool stuff that he does with acoustic guitar that came out of that unplugged era of his career and so that's what we're gonna be taking a look at the jam track that comes to this is a lot of fun it's just me on an acoustic guitar so it's kind of like a little virtual jam session me and you two acoustic guitars and and I'll show you how to play everything that I played in the intro note for note we'll break it all down and the best part is you'll be able to use these licks in your own playing whether you use an acoustic or electric guitar they work either way so I've got the 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 download the mp3 jam track so that we can jam together you're gonna want to go to active melody com go to the weekly lessons page and do a search for EP 3:03 all right so we're gonna cover a lot of material in this week's lesson but the really cool thing is you're gonna walk away with a whole new set of licks that you can use and apply to your own playing so this isn't about just memorizing but this is about learning these licks so that when you're at a jam blues jam or jamming with your buddies or writing your own music you can start to use these licks on electric or acoustic guitar and you'll find that they're pretty easy to play and they're pretty easy to understand we're gonna connect them back to basic things that you already know basic chord shapes so that it's really fairly easy to follow and something that you can play in any key now we're gonna be playing this in the key of E but I'm gonna show you how you can transpose everything we're gonna learn and play it in any key and that's the beauty of connecting it back to chord shapes and you can just as the you know you're playing it another key can just you know visualize the different keys and then the licks will follow so I remember when Clapton did unplugged back in 1992 you know it was on MTV and I remember watching it the night that it aired I'd been playing guitar for a few years when that came out and I remember just being blown away by that type of music it was ragtime it was classic traditional blues and you got to remember in 1992 with MTV everything was grunge the whole Seattle scene was really big it was Nirvana Pearl Jam Stone Temple Pilots it was those types of bands and so to hear you know Clapton doing a Bessie Smith song was like it was like a breath of fresh air for my ear it was like really nice and and it was so influential to so many guitar players everybody that play guitar was playing those songs playing those licks and you still still hear that to this day I mean it was that influential that that record and so it obviously was a big probably the highlight of Clapton's career was probably the biggest moment for him so anyway because of that I thought that this would be a great lesson to do and this is not any particular song from that record for copyright reasons I didn't do that but these are a lot of his classic licks that he played back then licks that he still plays to this day and there's sort of licks that everybody uses now and I attribute a lot of that to Eric Clapton so we're gonna be playing this in the key of E it's just a standard 12-bar blues you know key of e is a shuffle this is the kind of thing if you're sitting down with two guitar players and you want to jam with somebody this is the kind of thing somebody's gonna play that that classic shuffle blues and and these licks work really well over that so the first lick we're gonna learn sounds like this [Music] it's a Robert Johnson style leg and Clapton uses this quite a bit and lots of other people do and I always think it sounds kind of like a piano licks I always thought that Robert Johnson probably was influenced by piano players back in the day but what we're gonna be doing is playing an e7 chord and then go down a half step to an e diminished seven and then back to that G seven now all you're doing to play this is if you think of the d7 chord down in first position you take that chord shape and you slide it up two frets and then that's it that that chord shape then becomes an e7 now these are triads so they're not you know they're not for string there's just three strings in the core and so so that's how we're gonna play it now the timing of this goes like this triplet triplet triplet it's 3 1 3 1 3 1 3 1 those are the string numbers there's actually 3 and then 1 & 2 but what we do is we start with the third string or the down stroke and then we do an upstroke on strings 1 & 2 if you don't hit the 2nd string if you just hit string 1 that's okay too but try and hit the 2nd string with your upstroke so it goes like this right now you're going to take that and then you're gonna slide your hand down one fret everything goes down one fret same thing and then we're gonna slide it back to the e so now that's a classic blues you've heard that in red house you know the Hendrix song red house starts with that chord shape same kind of premise and so I want you to to not just memorize this but look at how that connects back to your E chord because we're kind of doing all of this over that e over the one chord so then if I were to say let's do it over F slide everything up so there's look there's your E chord shape we're going to slide it up we're gonna bar there now we've gone from an e to an F so how would I play that same Robert Johnston cell lick over now look at where your pinkie is we're gonna skip that fret we're gonna come up here right so look at how that connects so now if you did it over a so I you know just keep that in mind going forward if you ever want to use that lick or any derivation of that lick you can now use that you know how to connect it back to a basic chord shape okay so after this then I went you know the kind of the classic Robert Johnson thing so those are just down strokes it's the e7 the EDA minute 700 it's one two one two and then we come back to the e and then we walk it up to the forecourt so what we're doing there that's where the Sun goes to the egg goes to that you know the a shuffle there and so what I'm doing is I'm keeping my middle finger and my index finger down I'm just removing my ring finger and I'm only playing strings 2 & 3 - walk it chromatically up to this point now what is this well first of all let me show you the notes so my middle my index finger rather is on the 5th fret 2nd string my middle finger is on the 6th fret 3rd string and if you look at the a barre chord just strings 2 & 3 that's what we're playing we're just playing two strings two and three out of your a bard work we don't need the whole chord we just need those two notes out of it so what I was doing then as I was I was in the e7 I knew the song was going to the four chords so I just walked it up to the a chord and just remember that going forward that knit that may seem complicated to think well how would you know to do that when you're improvising and the only way I know to do it is this something I learned a long time ago and and now it's kind of stuck in my head so I know if I'm going from the one chord to the four chord I can go from here and just walk it up and I can do that in any key right you can you can start to see how it connects and works in other keys so so kind of practice playing along with some jam tracks and other keys and see if you can do that transition going from that one core to the four okay now once I came up here I did that classic little chromatic lick look at that so it's just slide up to the it's those two notes that we walked up to so your middle finger there again is on the sixth fret third string and then you do an up stroke on the fifth fret second string and then your ring finger comes up to the seventh fret first string and you walk it down seven six five down two three that's all in the first string now I don't want you to just play those notes and not put those in context so remember we we're all over the four chord now which is the a chord so we're kind of playing the chord changes in this part so there's our a chord now look at that leg look at that that Lincoln how it kind of connects back to that chord shape so hopefully even though those notes aren't necessarily in that chord shape you can anchor them to that chord shape so if I told you to play this in the for over a B then over the a right so you can start to see how they kind of connect that lick connects back to that chord shape so that way going forward if you like the sound of that you can use that in anything so that's how I did it the first time the second time [Applause] so it's got a little different timing the second time so it starts a little faster now we're going we're gonna start again with our middle finger on the fourth fret third string sliding it up to that sixth fret third string and then back to that fifth fret second string same leg and then watch this so that's how we're gonna wrap it up and you can hear that works over the e chord that's where the song goes back to the one for this lick right here I've used this over and over again and probably tons of these lessons so this was gonna be familiar for a lot of you that are familiar with these the lessons I do but I use that all the time when I'm improvising in the key of e because it just sounds so good so what we're doing is third fret first string open first string and then there's the second string which is the B string middle finger goes down on the second fret third string and then watch this there's the open open third string first fret on the third-string upstroke on string 1 or strings 1 & 2 or you could just go ahead and make the full ecord play the holy chord in the upstroke because your your fingers are free so you might as well okay so backing up then from that a when we go to the a part there's the first time through the second time [Music] it sounds like that alright so let me back us up now from the beginning and I'll play us up to where we are so we have one two three four [Music] alright alright so we're back to the one chord or the Igor and so the next thing that I played goes alright now this there's seems like there's a lot there but a lot of this is going to be kind of repetitive so we're gonna play a lot of the same legs over and over again something Clapton does so so what we're gonna do here that's really easy to do is three two zero three two zero it's on the first string and then the second string and if you think about what's going on there from a scale perspective the way that I think of that is you're kind of blending the main the minor and the major pentatonic scale so minor pentatonic scale and the major pentatonic scale right so you're going [Music] and then middle finger back on the second fret third string we've already put it there and then we're gonna do that same thing where we do the open third string hammer onto the first fret third string and then we're gonna do two up strokes in the open one string so let's back it up from the beginning of that so we have there's your two up strokes in the one string so that's the second or sorry the third fret second string open second string and then I'm doing a little hammer on pull off a little trill here on the first 1st fret 3rd string like that and then I do an upstroke on the 1 string the open 1 string so we have now that's a classic that little trill thing there happens quite a bit in blues I use that a lot and you can do it in any key it doesn't even have to be the open string you could do it and that works anytime you're going from the flat third to the third chord okay so ever so then after that the song goes to the 5 chord which is the B and so what I did was I could picture the B bar chord up here and I played basically that same leg same kind of thing that we did over the a remember that whole thing so over the Bo it it's the same thing the same exact lick except for there's one extra note in it so we so picture the bar chord there we're gonna take our middle finger which is in the bar chord we're gonna slide it up to the 8th fret 3rd string index finger goes down on the seventh fret second string and then ring finger on the ninth fret first string we're gonna walk it down all the way down so it's nine eight seven five and then that's the seventh fret second string alright so that's the same look as that a lake but we now we're just doing it over the B chord and hopefully it makes sense how you can connect that lick now back to the chord shape okay so let's back it up for the beginning now and play us up to that point we have one two three four [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so now the song goes to the a chord that play it's those same two notes out of that chord that we've already used where middle fingers on the sixth fret third string index fingers on the fifth fret second string that's just three two three two three is that triplet thing and then we're gonna slide that down two frets down to this is the same fingering but we're just going down two frets now once you've done there is you found from the a chord down to the back to the E chord that would be like the seven now they look like an e7 or if there's your a seven like we started with it's just those two notes out of that so you have [Music] then we're gonna come down to the second fret third string again do that same hammer on there there we are again we're just kind of tracing the notes out of that chord right look at that have you learned nothing else in this entire lesson you've gotta learn man that is so powerful right there [Music] [Applause] look at that you could make a whole song out of that and you can do that in any key right G right all right let's back up from the B we'll take it from the five chord to the a right now after that all right now that's this basically a lot of the same stuff we've already played the only difference is I'm gonna play that third fret first string twice and when I play it I push it sharp a little bit and then open open so it's open one string open second string middle fingers on the second fret third string again and then there's your open third string first fret third string and then your upstroke on the one string so we [Music] there's your turn around so that's just open which is you're a nut you're a sharp which is the first fret on the 5th string and then put your middle finger make sure you use your middle finger for this on the second fret fifth string so that the rest of these fingers can make the b7 chord like that that's a classic little turnaround move that you hear in the key of e all the time all right so that's really all there is to part one that's all of the licks and I know that that's a lot of information on the second video we'll go through the whole second half there's a whole new set of legs and so if you're not a premium member check it out it's incredibly affordable I put out lessons like this every week high-quality you get the tablature you get the jam tracks you get everything you need to be able to learn this stuff and it's a lot of fun it's actually a really cool community to be a part of too it's like a big family all right let me back up and I'll play through this part one video one more time and then I'll see you in part two so here we go one two three four [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 269,941

Keywords: blues guitar lesson, acoustic blues guitar, unplugged guitar lesson, unplugged blues guitar, unplugged blues guitar lesson, blues guitar tutorial, learn blues guitar, how to play guitar, how to improvise on guitar, how to jam on guitar, jam on guitar tutorial, acoustic guitar lesson, easy blues guitar lesson, music education, guitar education

Id: PXnBhEnb7Sg

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019