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How to play fingerstyle blues guitar: part 1
A tab and audio lesson on self-accompaniment
Guitar Techniques (Stuart Ryan), Mon 29 Jun 2009, 3:18 pm UTC
©iStockPhoto.com/zeljkosantrac
In this series of tab and audio lessons, Guitar Techniques magazine's Stuart Ryan takes you through a gigantic acoustic method for playing fingerstyle blues. This lesson is part one in the series - check out part two here and stay tuned for parts three, four and five!
Part 1: Self-accompaniment in DADGAD tuning
In this first series of exercises, we are going to take a look at how a repeated bass line is combined with some common rhythms to create the illusion of two guitars playing simultaneously.
You will find some of the rhythms very straightforward to play whilst others may be a little more taxing. Try these at various tempos to get a different feel each time. We are in DADGAD tuning here - alternative tunings are very common in blues styles and DADGAD is an easier one to work with initially. The main advantage here is that we have an octave from the open sixth string D to the open fourth string D and that facilitates our alternating bass pattern.
Audio (for exercises 1 - 8):
Exercises 1 and 2
Tab (click to enlarge):
Ex 1: Here is an example of the alternating bass; both notes should be plucked with the picking hand thumb and you have the option of using palm muting or letting the notes ring - in the case of the latter you have to be wary that they don't sound too loud over the ensuing chords...
Ex 2: Now a simple fragment of a chord is added with a semibreve rhythm - hold each chord for four beats against the bass line that is played on beats 1, 2, 3 and 4. The chords can be played with i and m or m and a on the picking hand.
