Blues Guitar Lessons – The Essence

The main goal of this course is to help you fully understand the blues sound and teach you how to integrate it seamlessly into your musical expression.

You’ll start by exploring the fundamental 12-bar blues harmony in various styles, enabling you to create rhythm variations based on the specific style—whether it’s traditional blues, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s sound, or the iconic BB King sound.

In order to play blues with authenticity, it’s essential to develop your aural knowledge and truly grasp how to create the blues sound. While the concept may seem straightforward in theory, the real learning comes from immersing yourself in the phrases and techniques used by legendary blues artists who have mastered both the groove and mesmerizing solos.

Throughout the 10-week duration of this blues guitar lessons course, each lesson will delve into a different topic, helping you gradually build your skills and knowledge.

To ensure your progress, you’ll be expected to submit weekly exercises and prepare for our school concert, which will take place at the end of the 10-week period. This will challenge and further enhance your abilities as a blues guitarist.

In these blues guitar lessons, you’ll acquire essential knowledge to excel in both rhythm and lead guitar, mastering various keys, 8 or 12-bar progressions, and diverse musical styles.

Discover how to navigate the guitar neck to find soulful blues notes in different keys, while honing your soloing skills to create captivating contrasts between chords and blues melodies.

You’ll learn the art of crafting phrases with logical melodic questions and answers, embracing the call-and-response technique that characterizes authentic blues expression.

Expand your musical vocabulary by studying and incorporating phrases used by blues legends, enabling you to speak fluently through your guitar.

Master major pentatonic scales for all chords, the mixolydian scale, major-minor arpeggios, and various harmonic-melodic tensions, equipping you with a versatile toolkit for creative exploration.

With these musical tools at your disposal, a continuous flow of ideas will emerge, allowing you to effortlessly express yourself on the guitar.

As a professional session guitarist, I heavily rely on these skills to maintain diversity and seamlessly adapt to various musical genres. This course will empower you to confidently tackle any musical challenge that comes your way, unlocking your true potential as a blues guitarist.

The blues sound is a non diatonic cloud of sound that we force over a group chords.  In simple terms we make major chords sound minor and the more we move away from the tonal centre the more we have to define the blues to keep the sound present.

The first step we must take, to feel this sound cloud, is to understand what key we are in, or the tonal center of our song. The first chord of our blues will define our tonal center. If our first chord is a G, then we can assume that we are playing blues in G.

Note: I assume you are aware of the blues progressions and the blues scale.

Have you ever felt that the blues cloud, the blues feel, disappears as you play other chords?

If you do not  have this feeling, then I must assume you are playing the blues correctly. However, if  you do, then consider that the more you move away from the tonal center, the more you will need to play the blues sound, and the less you will need to play the other chords completely.

Let’s say you’re playing a blues in G, and you notice the blues sound disappears when you play the C chord. To maintain the bluesy feel, don’t play the full C chord—just focus on its root note and infuse your playing with plenty of G blues sound. You’ll hear the blues sound come back to life.

Likewise, when playing the D chord, avoid playing the full chord and add more bluesy elements to it.

In all blues styles, the magic happens when we contrast the chord sound with the tonal center blues scale.

At the Creative Guitar School, our blues guitar lessons will guide you through various blues styles and teach you how harmony, melody, and blues scales interact to achieve the desired sound. Get ready to unleash the magic of blues in your playing!

These are some of my favorite blues players whom I listen to. The list will take you through a variety of styles in this musical language.