blues Archives - GUITARHABITS

5 Cool Blues Shuffle Riffs

5-Cool-Blues-Shuffle-Riffs-1b 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

Blues Riff Shuffles - 1 Continue Reading

6 Great Blues Guitar Tips From The Masters

By Klaus Crow 2 Comments

Today I’d like to share with you 5 videos with great blues guitar tips from the masters themselves. Robben Ford, Matt Schofield, Paul Gilbert, Larry Carlton and Joe Bonamassa will all give you some valuable tools and insights to optimise your blues playing.

The videos are for intermediate and more advanced levels, but even if you’re a beginner you’ll take something out of it.

Enjoy the masters!

ROBBEN FORD – “Blues Phrasing”

MATT SCHOFIELD – Blues Phrasing

PAUL GILBERT – Pentatonic Chicka and Vibrato

MATT SCHOFIELD – Sophisticated Blues

LARRY CARLTON – Melodic Soloing

JOE BONAMASSA – Electric Blues Licks Guitar Lesson

If you want to learn to improvise all over the neck, learn great blues licks, how to make up your own, connect licks together, learn to solo and really master all the blues pentatonic / blues scale shapes inside out, check out
The 50 Cool Blues Licks Improvisation course

Chord Progressions For Minor Pentatonic Soloing

By Klaus Crow 2 Comments

The minor pentatonic scale is the most used scale for soloing and it is used in a wide variety of music styles like pop, rock, country, metal, blues and more. It’s a great scale because it’s fairly easy to play which makes it a perfect beginner scale for soloing, but it also has the functionality to develop, expand, and improve your skills to high levels of advanced playing.

Once you know how to play the minor pentatonic / blues scale and how to use it for soloing purposes, you want to know over what chord progressions you can play the scale. There are a few ways to go about this.

Let’s dive in!

MINOR KEY CHORD PROGRESSION

Like the natural minor scale, you can also use the minor pentatonic scale to solo over a song or chord progression in a minor key. We will use the chords derived from the natural minor scale to build your minor key chord progression.

Here’s the formula to find the chords to your progression:
I=minor, ii=dim, III=major, iv=minor, v=minor, VI=major, VII=major

For instance, if you want to use an A minor pentatonic scale to solo over a song or chord progression in the key of A minor you start with filling in the notes of the A natural minor scale to the formula.

For example:
A natural minor scale (A Aeolian mode) = A B C D E F G
Formula for finding the chords = minor – dim – major – minor – minor – major – major
Chords for the progression: Am – Bdim – C – Dm – Em – F – G
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The Brilliant Benefits of The Blues Scale

By Klaus Crow 6 Comments

The pentatonic scale is a great scale to start out with when you’re learning to play lead guitar. But once you got that under your belt you can quickly move on to the blues scale. Even for guitar players who have kept their chops limited to the pentatonic scale for years, it will be enlightening to see how the blues scale can help out.

Although the blues scale doesn’t look that different from the pentatonic scale, the benefits are tremendous and can have a great impact on your soloing and creative expansion.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons that make the blues scale such an important and valuable scale. We’ll show you how to play the pentatonic scale and the blues scale in different positions. And further we’ll explain how it can benefit, grow and open up your playing.