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5 Robert Johnson Style Blues Turnarounds

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5 robert johnson style blues turnarounds 4Robert Johnson died at the age of 27 and today known as the Master of the Delta Blues (one of the earliest styles of blues music). His music has been a great influence on guitar players like Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and many others. In other words, Johnson’s music is the real deal!

His blues chops and turnarounds are a really nice asset to your blues vocabulary. Memorize these 5 Robert Johnson style blues turnarounds so you can take them out of your back pocket and put them into use whenever you need to play a 12 bar blues.

Practice them, get ‘m under your fingers and experiment with different turnarounds at the end of each 12 bar blues section.

Enjoy the lesson!Continue Reading

Double Stops and Blues Licks Around The Entire Neck

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A double stop is when you play two notes at the same time, also called “dyads” (you might have heard of the more familiar term “triads” where you play three notes at the same time).

While solos usually consists of single note lines, you can give your phrasing some extra colour and more chunk by playing some double stops here and there.

Double stops is just guitar slang for “harmonic intervals”. An interval is the distance between any two notes and harmonic means simultaneously sounding tones. Harmonic intervals can be played in thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths and sevenths.

You can hear them a lot in rock and blues and guitar players love using them to enhance their soloing.

Here are two examples of classic blues double stop guitar intros:

Cold shot – Stevie Ray Vaughan

Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry

You can apply harmonic intervals to every scale, but today we’re focusing on playing fourths in the A minor pentatonic scale. The application of fourths is one of the most used double stops in blues and rock.

In the tabs below you can see that almost every two notes are on the same fret, so you need to bar two strings with either your first finger (index finger), third finger (ring finger) or fourth finger (pinky). Continue Reading

Announcement: 50 Cool Blues Licks Improvisation

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Today I announce the arrival of my brand new guitar course:
50 COOL BLUES LICKS IMPROVISATION

“The Road To Playing Cool Blues Licks,
Mastering The Blues Scale, Improvising and Getting Motivated”

I’ve worked on this for quite a while and yes now it’s coming!

 

As a guitar teacher, guitar player and blogger I see a lot of guitar players are using the pentatonic scale for soloing and improvisation and that’s great because it’s a very practical an important scale that can be used for a lot of styles like blues, rock, metal, pop, country, etc.

For me it was also the first scale I learned, but after some time I noticed I got stuck soloing in just one position/shape for too long. I knew a few ways to break out of that shape area, but that was pretty much it. I felt limited.

I did know how to play the other pentatonic shapes but it was hard to make nice melodies or phrase fluently with all the other shapes. Somehow they didn’t seem to work really well.

Until I started learning the blues scale shapes and how to use them for improvising. It opened up a whole new world of possibilities. I was able to solo across the entire fretboard, it felt so natural and easy to do. It completely changed the way I was playing.

 

So over the years I got a lot of questions from the readers of guitarhabits about licks, the pentatonic / blues scale and improvisation. I thought, why not make a complete tablature Ebook with everything that combines those lessons I’ve learned over the years including video support and MP3 play along tracks. And so I began that journey…

 

With “50 Cool Blues Licks Improvisation” I will teach you a lot of awesome cool blues licks that you can use for your own solos and improvisation, but there’s more…

I want you to learn what’s behind the licks, how to break them up, turn them around, make up new ones, create different combinations and learn to play everything in every key like a real pro.

And those tools will be the perfect recipe for the chapters that follow, where you will learn how to play the 5 blues scale shapes all explained slowly in close up with effective exercises, tips, tricks and improvisation examples to master the blues scale inside out.

If you think this is for you, this is the time to really take your improvisation skills to the next level.

 

I know you are used to my free guitar lessons and they will sure continue to be, but because of the hosting, traffic and other costs that came up with the making of “50CBLI” and to keep the Ebook, play along tracks and more than 190 minutes of video lessons online for download I charge a rather small price of $69 dollars.

If you want to get out of your rut and advance your guitar playing check out the website to find out more:

WWW.50COOLBLUESLICKSIMPROVISATION.COM

 

Best regards,
Klaus Crow