Learn Blues Guitar

Learn Blues Guitar

Hello and welcome to my little blog. In the future, I will tell you here about my experience playing blues guitar, and how you can learn blues guitar yourself. It's a very complex topic of course! I've been playing only for 20 years but I still feel I need to learn so much. The subject encompasses such a wide area of topics - scales and chords, etc.

How hard is it to learn blues guitar? Well, I think it's an easy thing to start out with, because blues - unlike, say, metal guitar - can be a pretty basic thing from the start - so to speak, it's easy to learn and hard to master. But I'll tell you all about it in the future!

There's so many legends in blues guitar, it can be daunting to want starting to learn blues guitar yourself. But even if you're not going to be the next B.B. King, the enjoyment that comes from "playing through the blues", literally "feeling" it is beyond amazing. That's why the genre still prospers today, because many people think the same! They think that blues guitar represents perhaps the purest and deepest form of guitar playing, and frankly, I have to agree. There is just so much to playing blues guitar, whether it's about playing pentatonic scale, the 12-bar blues, just a lot of things make it daunting to learn blues guitar. But fear not! That's why I'm here now; I want to show that playing blues guitar can be easy after all. I will be posting my and other ideas on learning and playing blues guitar here shortly.

All the young kids today seem to be into metal and the speedy stuff. That's great, but blues guitar is about something else - it shows that you do need to play notes at a blinding speed in order to convey emotion. In fact, blues guitar is the antithesis of that idea. It seems as if many people start learning guitar because they feel they want to become the fastest, the most impressive. But that's not why I started out so many years ago. I was listening to an old recording of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and I thought - man, this isn't just about the guitar, there's real feelings to it, real emotions attached. And the guitar makes them graspable. Blues makes it graspable.

You have to wonder very often why people give up when they try to learn blues guitar. The truth is, it may seem easy at first, but it's easy to get lost in the technical stuff. It can make your head spin at times. As I am also a private guitar teacher, what I am telling my students when they come to me for their first lesson is - stop thinking visually for a moment. Close your eyes and just listen to the sound that your guitar makes. That's an important lesson, I find, because it clears your head for the truly important stuff. All the aspects pertaining to blues guitar, the scales, the chords, it's great, but it's just a means to an end. That's what people need to understand and should they finally do that - well, then, but only then they are able to improve their own skills as well.

Next time, I'll post a bit on how to start to learn blues guitar. I'll provide a couple sample lessons as well as a few links on where you can read up in detail.

See you next time guys!

Learn blues guitar