Every now and again a website or magazine asks me to write an article. Last month, Dutch Website Onder Invloed celebrated it’s 5th birthday with a PDF magazine and asked me to write about a musical influence; I chose skiffle music. You can download the PDF of the magazine from the Onder Invloed website:
Here’s a slightly longer version of the article than appeared in the magazine:
Following on from the 12 bar blues post earlier this week, Here’s some blues backing tracks in 3 different keys to practise your chops against:
12 Bar Blues in E backing track
12 Bar Blues in A backing track
12 Bar Blues in G backing track
Chord Sequences – All tracks have a 2 bar intro
E: E/E/E/E A: A/A/A/A G: G/G/G/G
A/ A/ E/E D/ D/ A/A C/ C/ G/G
B7/A/E/B7 E7/D/A/E7 D7/C/G/D7
This is a beginners guide to blues guitar. There are many forms of blues including the 8 bar (Key to the Hughway, Trouble in Mind), and 16 bar formats (Summertime, I’m your Hoochie Coochie Man), and the 12 bar blues. The 12 bar blues is almost certainly the most common form of blues, a music form that can be traced back to the late 19th century. Blues has its roots in Africa, although it is a quinticensually American music form which has many regional variations including, but not limited to Chicago blues, piedmont blues and mississippi delta blues. Musicians best known for piedmont blues include blind boy fuller, blind willie mctell, and possibly the best known sonny terry and brownie McGhee, with the style characterised by syncopated (meaning the emphasis is moved to between the beats) melody produced by playing the melody with the right and fingers while the right hand thumb keeps the beat.
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See and downlaod tablature of the music as a PDF
Bluegrass music, and more specifically bluegrass guitar can be thought of as an offspring of country music. Like all country it has it’s roots in European folk music brought by settlers into the U.S. in the 19th century and combined there with an African influence including the use of the banjo. The main instruments in early country music were fiddle, taken from the Scots and Irish traditions, the Spanish guitar and the banjo from Africa, with the music characterised by driving rhythms and songs singing of everyday experiences such as ranching, mining, logging as well as bank robberies, train crashes and desperados on the run.
Rhythm Guitar – by far the most important aspect of guitar playing. For instance name one great soloist who was not also a great rhythm player. Jimi Hendrix – developed a whole new style of rhythm playing (little wing, and almost everything else he recorded). Hendrix spent years playing rhythm guitar on the ‘Chitlin Circuit‘ for Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson among many others. Eric Clapton – Check out any of Claptons live recordings, but I dont think he’s ever been better than on the Bluesbreaker with Eric Clapton album. Rory Gallagher – A good shout for the best ever popular music guitarist. He could do it all; fingerstyle blues and ragtime, searing solos and great rhythm on electric, acoustic and mandolin. My favourite Bert Jansch…his style is all about rhythm with an attack on the guitar verging on violent, Neil young, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Ray Vaughan the list could go on forever, but the point being, the easiest way to become a better guitarist is to work on rhythm.
All you need is 3 chords and the truth, according to legendary Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard anyway, which is almost the same as learning to play the guitar from scratch. All you really need to be able to play 99.9999% of songs ever written are 5 major chords: C, A, G, E and D and a couple of minor chords too: Em, Am and Dm. A bit of rhythm doesnt go amiss either, so when you have your fingers on one of these chords (try a G), count to four and strum on every number…then add two strums a number, but slowly, as you don’t want to leave a gap when you change chord. Try changing from the G to a C and then maybe a D, and this is really is all there is to it.
