Though blues guitarists are more renowned for their guitar licks and solos than for riffs, good blues guitar players aren’t just able to touch your heart with sweet melodies.
In this lesson we’ll explore the rhythm in the blues with 10 guitar riffs that start from the very easy, and get pretty complex by the end.
For instance, if you can only play up to the third or fourth riff, you can still create simple blues riffs of your own. You will just have fewer options and your riffs will be simple, but you would have started training yourself to create music, as well as putting the techniques you know into practice.
Two Variants Of 12 Bar Blues Progression For A Guitar Player
Before we dig into the 10 easy blues guitar riffs, let’s get clear on some terminology that’s used when playing the blues.
The blues shuffle is a rhythmic pattern where instead of dividing the quarter note (crotchet) beat into two eight notes (quavers), it’s divided into a triplet where the first note is a quarter note and the second an eight note.
Though this rhythmic pattern is used in other genres of music, in the blues it is so common that many songs have an instruction at the top to indicate that all the beats should be divided this way (as you’ll see in the exercises below).
Ultimate Blues Riffs For Guitar (had 1452)
There are variations to this rhythm. In fact, blues guitar can never be tabbed perfectly since each player has his own nuances of playing the same thing.
These minor differences include holding the first note of each beat of the shuffle for a little longer, or a little shorter, than a quarter note, playing one or both notes as staccato, or putting a rest between the two notes.
For the purposes of this lesson we’ll stick to the example given above, however, keep in mind that in real-life situations, guitar tabs are rarely completely faithful to what blues guitarists play.
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These are usually played as either power chords (ex A5, D5, and E5 in the key of A) or as dominant 7th chords (A7, D7, E7), as well as minor, usually with an added 7
Note: If you’re learning music theory this may confuse you since there is no key that has all these three dominant 7
Chords in it. The reason for this is simple: Music theory describes what has been tried and tested by the great composers before us and found to work, not a set of rules.
Blues Guitar Rhythm Techniques
Many musicians deviate from these patterns and create their own. It is very common for the blues to deviate from traditional music theory norms. In fact, one can say that the blues has its own theory.
The next riff is slightly more complex because it makes use of string skipping technique, which simply means playing notes that do not fall on adjacent strings.
The first and third beats in each bar are made of the power chord while the second and fourth beats are made of intervals of a major 6th.
Blues Guitar For Dummies
This riff is almost identical to riff number 4, except that we start on note A on the fifth fret of the low E string, rather than on an open string.
Aside from the stretching exercise in itself, being able to play beyond the open position when playing double stops or chords opens up a lot of possibilities, including the ability to play in all keys.
The next riff introduces the interval of a minor seventh. This means more stretching, as well as more options under your belt when creating your own blues guitar riffs.
How To Do The Pentatonic Lick In A7
All the riffs we’ve explored so far are somewhat stereotypical, stuff that has been repeated over and over again with minor variations.
The note C sounds jarring with the underlying chord, which is A7, thus made of the notes A, C#, E, and G.
However, it is only used as a passing note to the chord tone C#. This way of resolving dissonance is very common in the blues.
How To Play Blues On Acoustic Guitar
Note that some bars sound more like blues guitar licks, than riffs. The reason is that there isn’t a huge difference between licks and riffs except that riffs are meant to be repeated while licks are not.
Though licks are usually played on the higher strings of the guitar, and riffs on the lower strings, this is not what really defines them. Thus a group of notes played on the higher strings but meant to be repeated can be considered a riff.
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