How To Play Blues Guitar Using An Awesome Riff

Welcome back! Today I wanna share with you some really cool guitar tabs blues.

The tab I wanna show you is a different way of playing blues. We are gonna use a the normal 12-bar blues progression but we are gonna spice it up a little bit; instead of using chords I’m gonna go with something that’s gonna sound way better. And if you are acoustic guitar player, you are gonna love this. We replace the chords with an awesome sounding riff. Now, this riff is gonna be composed in 12/8, as opposed to 4/4. It is just easier to write it that way.
Let’s just start with the first part:

guitar-tabs-blues_1.png

It’s a very easy riff and it can totally be played with an acoustic guitar or with a distorted guitar. I personally recommend using a Telecaster and a bit of tube distortion; it just sounds tasty. Now we are gonna transpose this riff to D7 and E7 like this:
D7

guitar-tabs-blues_2.png

E7

guitar-tabs-blues_3.png

Fairly simple, it is the same riff just transposed. We are also gonna add some single notes, just to incorporate something a bit different. You can either play them as an open sound or with palm mute. If you play it using a palm mute technique then you are gonna get some dynamics because the rest of the riff is gonna have an open sound.

guitar-tabs-blues_4.png

Now, if we incorporate it all together, we are gonna end up with something like this:

guitar-tabs-blues_5.png

I know it looks like a lot, but if you split and learn in the order I just showed you, then it will be way easier. I can also recommend you to mute every open string. For example in the first riff you have an open 5th string and it will sound really good if you mute it; it is just a great contrast between the muted sound and the openness of the rest of the riff.

This is all for today. I hope you enjoyed this article and please remember to check out all of our lessons at:

GuitarControl.com

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