If someone asked you what the most important part of playing blues guitar is… what would you say?<\/p>\n
Eric Clapton is known for saying that bends are about the only thing he still practices on… BB King used to say that he wished he played more chords in interviews I’ve seen.<\/p>\n
Well… I’m certainly not going to argue with BB or Eric, but most of us aren’t quite there yet.<\/p>\n
What if you’re still a mere mortal looking to get from sounding “unbearable” to “not too shabby?”<\/p>\n
For most beginners (no matter how long you’ve been a beginner) that problem seems to revolve around these 3 letter – R.H.M.<\/p>\n
R, is for Rhythm and it’s the backbone of most all music. Without it, you’re trying to hang your notes in mid air and just hope they are in the right place – and they aren’t. Imagine a house builder attempting to hang sheets of drywall on walls with no studs, or an art lover attempting to hang a painting in the middle of the room with no walls in sight… that’s what you’re trying to do with Rhythm and it won’t work.<\/p>\n
H, is for Harmony which means putting chords together. In the blues we have the 12 bar blues, the 8 bar blues, and many variations of both and others. Harmony’s good, but nothing without the rhythm.<\/p>\n
M, is for Melody which means the part you hum. Think of the great melodies, “Yesterday,” by the Beatles or “Sweet Home Chicago,” by Robert Johnson. Take away those melodies and all you have are some chords and a beat… and no one walks away humming chords and a beat.<\/p>\n
The 3 letters are in their order of importance, yet most guitar players go backwards – or at the very least they start in the middle with chords, then go to melody, and then try to add some rhythm later.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, that almost never works either.<\/p>\n
You’ll notice in pretty much every video I ever do that I count out loud and I make sure that you know what beat to play each and every note on – that’s on purpose because I’ve come to find that most folks who have been learning off the internet have left out this most important skill.<\/p>\n
Sure, it might not be fun or sexy or even all that interesting, but without it you create a glass ceiling that at some point you’re going to have to break through – and that never gets easier the longer you put it off.<\/p>\n
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If someone asked you what the most important part of playing blues guitar is… what would you say? Eric Clapton is known for saying that bends are about the only thing he still practices on… BB King used to say that he wished he played more chords in interviews I’ve seen. Well… I’m certainly not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6803"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6803"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7241,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6803\/revisions\/7241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}