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Learn To Play Blues Guitar

What Is The Blues?

It is not that easy to pull out a definition of blues. You can tell that Robert Jhonsons’ Rambling on My Mind or B.B. King’s Everyday I Have the Blues is definitely blues, but what about van Halen, Al Di Meola or Pavarotti’s songs?

Of course, you might outline the blues by the call-response structure, the dominant 7th chords, the shuffle rhythm, the I-IV-V progression and stuff like these, but the most complete definition is one that Eric Clapton himself gave to blues music in an interview in 1998 :

My definition of Blues is that it is a musical form which is awfully trained and structured joined with a state of mind, and you may have either of those things but it is the 2 together which make it what it is. And you have to be a student for one, and a human for the other, but those things alone do not do it. ( Eric Clapton, 1998 )

The Blues History

There are a lot of books on the history of blues. It was born in the 20 th century’s Mississippi Delta in the U.S, short after the Civil War. This music style was played by slaves and white people referred to it as sorrow songs, plantation songs or workaday songs. The term blues was employed for the 1st time around 1925.

It is thought the band leader William Christopher Handy was the one to draft the 1st blues songs in 1909, which was later made public and documented. The track was at first called Memphis Blues and got the name of Mister Crump later. He got his inspiration from a blues song he heard in the Mississippi train line station 6 years back. Handy wrote other songs too , for example Beale Street Blues or St. Louis Blues and nowadays there’s a blues award named after him the W.C. Handy Award.

What Do You Need To Learn To Play Blues Guitar?

In order to be taught how to play blues guitar, there are a couple of things you want. First off, you want to have an electrical or acoustic guitar with strings made of apart from nylon in standard tuning. You also must know the way to read tabulator, as well as have some basic guitar information and understand how to play some chords.

You also need some Eric Clapton CDs with blues classics , for example Blues Breakers, From the Cradle or Eric Clapton Unplugged and a good CD player with an auto-repeat shuffle. There’s also a plugin for Winamp you may use to decelerate music. A little chord book you can find in any guitar shop is also handy. But most significantly, to learn how to play blues guitar, you want some good ears.

If you already have some basic guitar data, you can learn how to play blues guitar on your own, with the aid of a straightforward chord book. finding a blues guitar tutor who is prepared to help learn how to play blues guitar in your area is definitely a great thing. If you have time and money to take up non-public lessons, this will often help improving your guitar playing abilities.

Everything they never told you about Review of Learn and Master Guitar revealed! For more insider tips and information be sure and check out Learning Guitar In A Easy Way.

Jarvis D. Burris

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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