Blues Guitar - The Root Of All Music
65The origin of rock and roll
Anybody interested in modern music sooner or later asks the question, "Where did today's popular music come from?" The answer is the blues. There may be many musical milestones but the blues is the whole journey. So let us look at where the blues came from, where it went and who it met on the way. We will also take a look at the "blues guitar sound" and how it has its unique effect on our feelings.
Acoustic Blues Guitar
Where did the blues come from?
Some people claim that the roots of blues music can be found in West Africa. Whether or not we can be so precise, the fact is that many slaves from Africa adapted the spontaneous singing they had been doing all their lives to their new way of life in the Mississippi Delta. They had no plan to influence the culture of their new world, they just did it. They sang in the fields, at social gatherings and in church. As time went on professional composers and entertainers began to form a musical genre.
Learning How To Play Blues Guitar - The Basics
So where do you begin to learn how to play blues guitar? If you do not already know how to read sheet music or tab, find a tutorial on guitar tabs. This is the fastest written guitar music to learn and any blues music you need will be found in tab. Also you need to know what chord charts are, and how to read them. Neither chord charts or tab is hard to learn. What will take some practice is developing your ear so that you can learn riffs and licks from records.
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How to Play Solos on the Electric Guitar
The blues in church
The blues genre began in the early twentienth century when W.C. Handy published "Memphis Blues", "St Louis Blues", and other songs which reached the hearts and souls of black people. To people like W. C. Handy who were raised singing in church, the piano was the natural instrument to accompany their songs. But the guitar has always been popular so it deserved a place in blues and jazz. Blues guitarists like twelve string guitar player Leadbelly and electric guitar innovator of the future, B.B. King were making sure the guitar would always be part of blues music. Some blues guitarists made their living in smoky saloons playing slide guitar using a bottle neck or the blade of a knife to fret the notes.
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The birth of rock and roll
In the early nineteen fifties artists like Elvis Presley and Bill Haley were calling the blues "rock'n'roll" and the players of the electric blues guitar like B.B. King were making the world aware of the lead guitar. The guitar had always taken its turn for solos in jazz bands but now it competed with the singer for the attention of the audience.
Why not learn to play the blues?
- A Diagram of the Parts of the Electric Guitar
The picture above shows the parts of the electric guitar. This explanation of the parts of the electric guitar gives you the basic knowledge you need before you start playing. The production, amplification and distortion of the sound made by the electric guitar is an art in itself, but the basic principles are easy to understand. The guitar in the picture is a solid body electric called a Stratocaster. The guitarist picks or strums the strings, and the pickups – microphones situated near the bridge – transfer the sound to an amplifier. The BODY of the guitar is made of wood, and is much heavier than an acoustic guitar. There are electric guitars with hollow chambers which makes the instruments much lighter. In the early stages of development of the electric guitar, feedback was a problem when pickups were fitted to hollow body guitars. The solid body eliminated this problem. The guitar PICKUPS are situated just above the bridge. There are usually three pickups which can be used together or independently. When the strings vibrate, a current is created in the pickup which creates the sound in the amplifier. The guitar is connected to the amplifier by a cable plugged [...]A Diagram of the Parts of the Electric Guitar Related posts: A Diagram of the Parts of the Acoustic Guitar This is a picture of the parts of an acoustic... The Basics Of The Electric Guitar If you have already had a guitar lesson or two,... - 4 weeks ago
- A Diagram of the Parts of the Acoustic Guitar
This is a picture of the parts of an acoustic guitar. The BODY of the acoustic guitar is the large part to which the bridge and neck are attached. An acoustic guitar body is hollow, and made from cedar or spruce – both of which possess the necessary acoustic and aesthetic qualities for guitar making. The HEADSTOCK at the top of the neck, holds the MACHINE HEADS which change the tension of the strings to get them in tune. The strings are anchored at the BRIDGE (which also transmits the sound to the body of the guitar) and are held at the required tension by the machine heads. The part of the bridge that actually holds the strings is called the SADDLE. The saddle is made of bone or plastic and is the point where the sound is transferred from the strings to the body. The SOUNDHOLE plays a role in producing of the sound of the acoustic guitar. Not a lot of sound actually comes out of the sound hole but the presence of the opening allows the wood in the body to vibrate without restriction. The NECK – which is flat at the top and curved at the [...]A Diagram of the Parts of the Acoustic Guitar Related posts: A Diagram of the Parts of the Electric Guitar The picture above shows the parts of the electric guitar.... The Best Guitar Strings For Acoustic Guitar There are big differences between guitar strings for acoustic guitar.... Acoustic Guitar Tab Lessons Acoustic Guitar Tab Squidoo Lens is where we get to... Right Hand Acoustic Guitar Flatpicking Techniques A foundation of flatpicking technique is freedom of movement. Your... Free Acoustic Guitar Lessons Learn-Acoustic-Guitar.com was started a couple of years ago by Ralph... Read back issues of Acoustic Guitar Notes Acoustic Guitar Notes (formerly AG Wire) is a free ”opt-in”... Learn To Play Acoustic Guitar You watch a guitarist playing an acoustic guitar, doing some... Finding And Learning How To Play Popular Acoustic Guitar Songs Thinking of popular acoustic guitar songs, Peter, Paul And Mary... - 5 weeks ago
- Learn to play guitar online with guitar tab and music tools
If you want to learn to play guitar, you will occasionally need to write your own guitar tab. It can be done using a text editor but it is a long job. There are free and paid guitar tab editing programs available that can allow you to write the tabs and play them back as MIDI files. TuxGuitar is one of the best examples of this kind of tab editor, and it’s free. This video gives you a little info about Tuxguitar: For $19.95, at gootar.com, you can buy a six-pack of music notation tools consisting of a tab generator with sound, a guitar chord generator, a tab splicer for joining tabs, a program that makes a list of chords from any scale, a blank chord chart generator, and a piano chord finder with sound. If you don’t need to hear the tab played back, go to the tab generator at The Guitar Files for a simple and quick tab writer. I should also mention Easy Tab Maker Pro 4.31 which writes guitar tab as you play. You plug your guitar into your computer and play. While you are playing, the program analyzes the sound to convert into tab form [...]Learn to play guitar online with guitar tab and music tools Related posts: Learn how to play guitar from sheet music Here is a video on how to read music. Walt... Acoustic Guitar Tab Lessons Acoustic Guitar Tab Squidoo Lens is where we get to... - 7 weeks ago
The blues continues
The blues can be played in any key and is found in three basic forms: eight bars, for example "Heartbreak Hotel", sixteen bars like "Saint James Infirmary" and twelve bars like "St. Louis Blues". For some reason the twelve bar blues form is more popular with audiences than the other two, and it is the basis of many great songs outside the blues genre.
After years of imitating their idols something odd happened to the white blues guitar players in Britain and the USA. They developed their own original styles. The older generation of blues players even started using the modern arrangements of blues songs and adopting some of the musical innovations introduced by young white guitarists like Eric Clapton. So foreign culture influences American popular music and in turn gets fresh input from a new generation of guitar players from all over the world.
How to practice blues guitar
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Blues guitar has many many different styles. Blues guitar has so many different techniques. There's a great variety of ways to pick the blues. Even though my preference is for the classic acoustic blues men, a select few of the modern day 'icons', like Stevie Ray Vaughan just blow me away. Excellence is instantly recognizable, whenever the music was made. In my opinion, it seems that the best music of today has it's roots in acoustic blues, that's why I keep keep going back to that music. You can still hear the riffs of Johnson and other legends in all present day rock. Also, Piedmont guitar is evident in jazz classics. Any one starting to learn blues guitar should start from the beginning and progress until they find their passion.
















Ralph Deeds Level 6 Commenter 4 years ago
Nice Hub!