Beginner Blues Guitar – Blues in E
If you’re just starting out with the guitar, learning how to play a basic blues is a great use of your time. If you get together with other players (guitar, or other instruments) to play music, knowing about the blues will come in very handy, as it is part of the common language between people who play guitar, and other instruments.
Another factor to consider is that all major forms of popular music have their roots in the blues. So, the idea being that if you can play the blues, it will help you play nearly everything else. So, enough with the sales pitch, let’s get to it!
Blues in E part I
Every song has it’s own form, or structure that you follow as you play the song, and blues songs are no different. There are some variations out there, but 99% of the time, you will play a 12 bar blues form.
At it’s simplest, there only 3 chords in a blues. In the key of E, those chords are E, A and B. By chords here, I mean either full chords, or little pieces of chords – you’ll see what I mean when you watch the video. Since I’m trying to keep it simple in this video, we’ll leave music theory out of it for the time being.
For the 1st video, I cover the first 8 bars of the blues song form. Here, I’ll cover only 2 chords, or in this case, chord “riffs” – E and A. The way it lays out is bars 1-4 are E, 5-6 are A, and 7-8 is E again. Follow along as you watch the video, and/or play the tabs (scroll down). Here’s another way to view it…
Don’t forget to download the tabs under the video. I hope that helps!
Blues PDFs – learn these in order!
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