5 Ways The Blues Will Make You Happy - As You Learn Guitar
As you learn guitar, you'll find the Blues genre to be a good friend of yours.
This is the father of Rock, after all, so you'll notice a lot of similarity in blues to rock, pop, country and other modern music types.
But you'll also like playing Blues music on the guitar as you learn it. Even if you're more interested in Rock, Metal, Popular, or anything else, you'll still enjoy the Blues and learn a lot about making music for any genre on the guitar. So much music from Country, Rock, Metal, and Pop is based on the Blues when you get right down to it. This makes studying the Blues in your guitar lessons a great place to start. And as you get better and better you might want to move your studying to other types of music, or you might decide to just keep playing blues music.
Here are some reasons the Blues will make you happy as you learn to play the guitar.
- Familiar I IV V progression
- Familiar pentatonic scales
- Easy to adjust playing to any skill level
- Slower tempo (usually)
- Its fun!
A lot of Blues songs, probably the majority, are played at a tempo that's somewhat slower than the typical Rock or Pop song. This is great for a beginner and even intermediate player who is maybe still not as quick as he wants to be at chord changes, solo playing, etc. Not having to worry so much about keeping up let's you enjoy the song more, and have fun. Rather than speed or technical finesse, Blues is about expression and feel, and this is a great way to play. You can concentrate more on the song itself, and worry less about getting everything just right.
Learning to hear the I IV V
Blues uses the familiar I IV V chord progression. Soon after you begin listening closely to music you should be able to recognize and detect these chord changes in any song you hear quite readily. This is your signal that you are hearing the music and you're ready to be improvising over Blues chord changes. And this is where the fun begins. You have the option to learn the solos of popular Blues classic songs note for note if you wish, on the other hand, you also have the option (and the skill) to break away and play just what you feel.
Most of the lead and solo guitar playing for the Blues is done with the Pentatonic scale. And most of it is done from 1 main box shape. So as soon as you learn this 1 shape, you can move it up and down the neck for any key and you'll be able to play a huge percentage of all the Blues music out there. This is a great amount of bang for the buck as you are jamming to a lot of great Blues music very soon into your guitar learning experience. And as an added bonus, all the pentatonic lick and soloing knowledge you acquired for Blues playing will help you with Rock, Country, etc.
Another thing about playing the blues that makes it especially valuable for someone learning to play the guitar is you can play the same song in a way that is as technically difficult as you want it to be. In other words, if you want to play the 3 chords the song has in just the simplest open chord format you can, then that's fine and go ahead and do that and the song will sound just fine, and you'll have a good time playing in. And at the same time, if you want to add a lot of 9th chords and play them in positions all up and down the neck and make a lot more chord changes than are listed in the music, well that's fine too. It seems that you have much more latitude with the Blues to adapt and make the songs as you see fit for your present circumstances. You have a lot of freedom with this genre.
There's a lot of good Blues music available to you. While you might not know it by turning on the radio, there's a ton of great blues music out there. On youtube and other internet video sites, you can find great sounding blues backing tracks that you can use as your band as you practice your Blues lead guitar playing. And a lot of these backing tracks have video responses posted where someone has recorded a lead electric guitar solo played to the backing track and posted it as a response. You can listen to, enjoy, and learn a ton from these video responses.
