Electric Blues Guitar Basics

Course details

The classic electric blues ‘sound’ emerged from the playing of acoustic blues but requires a very different set of skills and techniques. And since blues is the inspiration for many contemporary music styles, a solid understanding of the form is essential for any electric guitar player. Waltons New School of Music's Electric Blues Guitar Basics course provides participants with an extensive introduction to electric blues playing and covers the following elements:

• Major and minor pentatonics and the blues scale
• Pentatonic to the blues – how to turn the scales into effective lead melody lines
• Phrasing and stressing the blues – introducing phrasing and rhythm into your playing, and making effective use of the blues/pentatonic scales, using slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs, trills
• Bending the blues – what notes to bend, different types of bends (pre-bend, slow release, whole tone bends, double stop bends)
• Chromatic and passing notes and minor 7th arpeggios
• Improvising over basic 12-bar blues using all the above techniques
• Classic licks – learn how the legends have done it

Along the way participants will be introduced to the major figures through listening sessions and numerous practical examples.

Although this course is an introduction to electric blues, it is not a course for electric guitar beginners.Participants in Electric Blues Guitar should have at least one year’s playing experience, be able to read guitar tablature and have a good grasp of basic open-position chords as well as standard barre chord fingerings. Changing from one chord to another should not be a problem.

Electric Blues Guitar Basics is one of our group courses. Private, partner, group and intensive lessons in electric blues guitar and other guitar styles are also available.