Blues Archives - GUITARHABITS

5 Cool Blues Shuffle Riffs

October 11, 2018 By Klaus Crow 2 Comments

Playing “walking blues lines” is a common thing for bass players, but also guitar players do not shy away from a nice walking blues shuffle riff.

The blues shuffle riff is a popular sound and often used by guitar players like T-Bone Walker (Going to Chicago, T-bone Shuffle) and Stevie Ray Vaughan (Cold shot, Pride and joy, Travis walk).

While blues rhythm guitar suffices with a standard 12 bar blues shuffle, a cool shuffle riff is often more fun to play and interesting listen to.

Also for the blues lead guitar player it’s great to solo over a blues shuffle riff. The combination of a cool lead solo improvisation and a nice blues shuffle riff will lift the music to greater heights.

Today we have 5 Cool blues shuffle riffs to get your hands dirty. Starting out with a nice & easy shuffle riff gradually leading up to more challenging riffs. A video lesson and tablature is provided for each shuffle riff.

Enjoy!

Cool Blues Shuffle Riff 1

Top 20 Easy Blues Guitar Songs For Beginners

May 18, 2018 By Klaus Crow 2 Comments

For me guitar and blues are like salt and pepper, or like Yin and Yang. They are strongly connected to each other and found in every style of music, whether you’re playing rock, country, jazz or metal. So it’s a good thing for every guitar player to learn some vital blues skills.

Well, today we have a Top 20 Easy Guitar Songs for Beginners. While these songs are a really good fit for the blues beginner, they are just as perfect for the intermediate or advanced guitar player. After all, it’s all about the songs.

The Top 20 starts out with some basic blues chord songs and 12 bar blues shuffles, and at the end of the list there’s room for some nice beginner blues soloing. They are all excellent songs to start out learning to play the blues. Pick your choice.

If you find that some song intros are still a bit too challenging you can just skip the intro and start with the verse. You’ll learn the challenging parts later when you’re up for it. Now just have some fun playing some nice blues classics.

As with all things guitar, you need to invest some practice time to figure out and learn each song thoroughly. Some are easy, and some require a bit effort depending on your skill level. So if you’re really just starting out you might want to use some of these handy tools to figure out the guitar parts.

Each song title in the list contains a link to the song on Youtube. The “Chords and Tabs” links will give you the chords or tabs to the song and the “More Chords/Tabs” links will show you the official transcribed chords/tabs if you want to learn more songs of the same artist.

Enjoy the songs!

1 – Kindhearted Woman Blues – Robert Johnson – Chords – More Tabs

2 – Manish boy – Muddy Waters – Tabs – More Tabs

3 – Sweet home Chicago – Robert Johnson – Tabs – More Tabs

4 – Blues stay away from me – Delmore Brothers – Chords

5 – Take Out Some Insurance – Jimmy Reed – Chords

6 – Boom boom – John Lee Hooker – Tabs – More Tabs

7 – T bone shuffle – T Bone Walker – Tabs

8 – Smokestack Lightnin’- Howlin’ Wolf – Tabs

9 – Suitcase – Keb Mo – Tabs – More Tabs

10 – Life by the drop – Stevie Ray Vaughan – Tabs – More Tabs
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Your First Pentatonic Scale

January 18, 2018 By Klaus Crow 2 Comments

This tutorial has been conceived for beginner guitar players who want to go beyond strumming chords and start playing scales all along the fretboard.

Learning how to play scales is a great way to expand your musicality and exercise your fingers agility; one of the easiest scales to learn at the beginning of your lead guitar adventures is definitely the scale pentatonic.

We’re going to see the pentatonic scale in open position, that means that the shape of the scale uses some open strings. This decreases the complexity of the fingering and makes easier to play great melodies.

What is a Pentatonic Scale
In the word “pentatonic”, “penta” means “five”, in fact a pentatonic scale is composed of 5 notes (in this tutorial we’re not going to investigate the historical origin of this scale, you can find an interesting article on that here)

We already know the major scale. In the key of C, the major scale is:

C D E F G A B

By definition, a major scale pentatonic is like a major scale, without the 4th and 7th degrees. Thus the C major scale pentatonic is composed of the following notes:

C D E G AContinue Reading

Top 10 Best Christmas Blues Guitar Songs

December 14, 2017 By Klaus Crow 3 Comments

There are a bazillion Christmas songs out there, but what about Christmas blues guitar songs from real blues guitar legends? You don’t hear them much, but they are definitely out there. So I thought it was time for a “10 Best Christmas blues guitar songs” list. From now on, no more Christmas without blues guitar!

I just love hearing those sweet bluesy chops from BB King, Clapton and John Mayer. You gotta love that. When I hear that, it makes me pick up my guitar straight away.

But also the pure and raw blues from the early days by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Charley Jordan is candy to the ears. There’s great Christmas blues music that really deserves a good listen, so take a moment to enjoy these songs.

Notes: Each song title contains a Youtube link. This list is in no particular order, it’s just here for you to enjoy and to be inspired. Do you know a great Christmas Blues Guitar song? Please share it in the comments. I appreciate it.

Happy Holidays!

1 – Back Door Santa King – BB King

2 – Cryin’ Christmas Tears – Eric Clapton

3 – Christmas Blues – Canned Heat

4 – Please come home for Christmas – John Mayer Continue Reading