Playing Through The Blues.
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Playing Through The Blues.
Blues Slide Guitar
Slide guitar playing in blues music had been popular for many years but not many people understand how this guitar playing style originated and the techniques used to produce this fascinating guitar sound. In the early twentieth century many American blues players began their careers playing music on a single string instrument called a diddley bow. This was a kid’s toy consisting of a wire stretched between two screws. It seems logical that without access to store bought instruments the emerging adult musicians would develop an instrument based on what they played music on as children. Of course the early blues players did use conventional guitars but a guitar played with a slide made from a knife or a bottle neck more readily complemented the vocal style and blues harp techniques the people used to express their lives in music.
Blues guitar players who took up slide guitar and influenced other musicians to do so were Muddy Waters and Elmore James. Both of these guitarists were driven by the music of Robert Johnson, built on his legacy and further influenced electric blues players like Johnny Winter and Duane Allman. Elmore actually started his musical career on the diddley bow when he was twelve years old. A confirmed individualist, he played a modified acoustic guitar to sound like a solid body electric.
Many students of blues slide guitar think that Earl Hooker is the greatest slide guitar player ever. He sometimes uses wah-wah with his slide playing and often amazed other musicians with his ability to make the slide guitar “sing”. But Earl Hooker did not need electronic effects to make his playing great as people who played music with him praise his technical skills. Elmore James’ song, “The Sky Is Crying” was covered by modern blues legends Albert King, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn and George Thorogood.
Arguably one of the most high profile slide guitar players is Ry Cooder. He is a skilled guitarist who enjoys injecting his own personality into traditional songs of many genres but he is remembered for his slide guitar on the soundtracks of “Paris Texas” and “Crossroads”. For these contributions alone he must be included in any list of blues slide guitar players.
Duane Allman was a great blues player of the late sixties to early seventies probably most widely known for being the “other” guitarist on the Eric Clapton song, “Layla”. His mastery of blues music is undisputed and there is a story of the joy he expressed the day he discovered how well a Coricidin bottle could be used as a guitar slide. The story goes he had never played slide guitar before but after that day his slide playing became an indispensable part of The Allman Brothers Band repertoire.
If you want to learn how to play blues slide guitar, you will probably need to learn to play using open tunings, maybe even get yourself a guitar with heavy gauge strings and a high action specifically for open tunings. But to learn slide guitar techniques you can begin with any steel string electric or acoustic guitar using standard tuning. You will need your index finger to damp strings that you do not want heard so experiment with your slide fitted to your middle, ring finger or pinky. You will also want to try out finger picking style playing combined with slide techniques.
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Learn To Play Blues Guitar Solos And Make Them Yours
When you first think about learning to play blues guitar solos you will be faced with wanting to play the blues like the guitar players of the past, but at the same time you don’t want to just play their material note for note. The sooner you get rid of the idea that you have to be original right off the bat, the sooner you will be really original. By learning the riffs and licks of B.B. King, Eric Clapton or Duane Allman you are giving yourself something to play. And as you play this music that other guitar players have recorded, you are developing your own style. You don’t have your own voice to start with, you need to play other people’s stuff to develop yourself.
So put aside your ideas that guitar players start off with their own material, and start learning the solos of whatever guitar players you admire from their records. Learn simple licks at first. The first thing you might discover that surprises you is that the solos of the great blues guitarists is not rocket science. Great music does not have to be hard to play.
So you don’t need an amazing guitar technique to start learning blues but you do need to work on how you play. For this you need to record yourself playing. Do it often and listen to it closely. The way you sit or stand as you play, the way you hold the pick, the amount of force you put into your strokes and whether you use up or down strokes. All of these things are important to whether your playing sounds right.
If you think you need improvement, get some advice. Ask other guitar players what they think. Do some busking, get some reactions from your audience. Record a video of your playing, post it on YouTube and get some comments. Go on guitar forums, post the link to your video and ask for feedback.
But before you do any of that, you need to have some basic guitar chops. I said before you don’t need an advanced technique, but you need to be good enough to play with a little authority. You need to pass your enthusiasm for the music onto your listeners. If you are hesitant and worrying about making a mistake, you need some more hours of practice till you get past that stage.
One thing blues guitar solos are not is the guitar player’s effects and equipment. If you want to use a certain sound for your playing, that’s fine but when you are learning solos, concentrate on learning the music, do not worry about the sound at this stage of your learning. After all, when Eric Clapton stopped playing through Marshall amps or using the wah-wah pedal, it didn’t mean he had stopped playing the blues. So a certain guitar sound does not make the blues.
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McKinley Blues
No, this isn’t the story of Blues music on America’s highest mountain, this is the story of influential blues musician McKinley Morganfield, a virtuoso of slide guitar.
Slide guitar is also known a bottleneck guitar because bottlenecks were the first materials used to produce the effect. Normally a guitar player varies the pitch of notes by pressing a string down against a fret. Slide guitar players place a slide across the strings and move it along without lifting, creating continuous changes in pitch, sometimes in addition to using their free fingers to fret the guitar, sometimes not. The chords available are limited, so many musicians, including Mr Morganfield, use open tuning, a technique where the guitar strings are tuned to a particular chord (often D-G-d-g-b-d) which then changes key as the slide moves up and down the neck of the guitar. The origin of the technique is not clear. There is an Indian instrument, the Vichitra Veena which is played with a slide, as are many African one stringed instruments, though these don’t share the challenges of slide guitar where strings which are playing the ‘wrong’ notes have to be muted.
Robert Johnson was one of the early influential guitarists to use the slide technique, but slide guitar couldn’t be contained and burst from the acoustic world to electric guitar with the early blues musicians, and particularly with McKinley Morganfield who really brought the sound to electric guitar. “I Cant Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home” were recorded in Chicago in 1948 and became hits for Mr Morganfield, bringing him a long way from his birth in Mississippi and early days as a field hand. If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard the name, it may be because you know the nickname better, McKinley Morganfield was better known as Muddy Waters.
Born in 1913 and raised by his Grandmother in Clarksdale Mississippi, McKinley Morganfield enjoyed playing in mud, hence the nickname Muddy. He added the ‘Waters’ himself later. Aged 13 he learned to play harmonica, but four years later, after hearing Robert Johnson he took up the guitar and by age 17 he was playing at various local events, his style a mixture of Johnson’s slide guitar playing and Son House’s tone. He married for the first time in 1932 but his wife left three years later when his first child was born, but not to her. In 1941 collectors came from the Library of Congress, looking for Robert Johnson in the hope of recording his music. Johnson was dead, but Muddy Waters was willing and able to demonstrate. He was recorded in 1941 and 1942 and then left the South for good in 1943 to move to Chicago.
It was Muddy Waters who brought blues, and specifically electric blues to England in the late fifties to influence an entire generation, though he himself was surprised that the music, which had arisen in black America, was losing it’s appeal within the black community who were turning to soul music. At the same time young white teenagers were becoming huge fans. The Rolling Stones named themselves for one of Water’s songs, Eric Clapton grew up loving the sound, and Led Zeppelins ‘Whole Lotta Love’ is based on a Muddy Waters song ‘You Need Love’. It may be his influence which spread the use of slide guitar to the rock and roll world where it has developed still further. The Rolling Stones and ZZ Top have all used the technique as have Pink Floyd and even George Harrison, who experimented with it during his time as a Beatle and on later solo songs like ‘My Sweet Lord’. Martin Scorsese the film director is a confirmed fan and has used Muddy Waters songs in many of his films, such as Casino and Goodfellas.
Muddy Waters continued to work throughout his life. His last performance was with Eric Clapton’s band in Florida in 1982. He died a few months later. He is ranked #17 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, but his true influence can’t possibly be measured.
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Blues Breakers
US only 24 kt gold-disc pressing. Limited and numbered edition!
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Featuring Some Of The Great Guitar Blues Players
In the history of the guitar blues there have been some great players and fortunately many of those great players are still with us today. Whether you prefer smooth guitar blues or whether you like to have your guitar blues smash you in the face there have been players to oblige you and to entertain you for over a century now. Here is a quick look at some guitar blues players that have made an impact.
BB King
BB King has been playing guitar blues for over 60 years and is one of the standards that people use when they talk about guitar blues players. He has recorded with such great bands as U2 and is best known for his trademark hollow body electric guitar he calls Lucille. He was originally called the Beale Street Blues Boy but before his first record came out the record company shortened it to BB and used his real last name of King to create the name BB King. In over 60 years BB King has played his smooth style of blues all over the world.
Eric Clapton
Known simply as “Slow Hand”, Eric Clapton is a self taught guitar prodigy who got his start in the famous 1960’s hard rock blues band Cream. After Cream disbanded he went on to form such acts as Derrick And The Dominoes but Clapton was always displaying his trademark slow hand smooth guitar blues style somewhere in the world. Recently Cream was reunited for a few shows and it is unknown whether or not they will stay together but even without a reunited Cream Eric Clapton has still left his mark as one of the greatest guitar blues players ever.
Robert Johnson
It is difficult to talk about guitar blues players without talking about the man that greats such as Jimi Hendrix and Muddy Waters cite as one of their prime influences. Robert Johnson was born in 1911 and died in 1938 but in between there he recorded and released at least a half dozen or more records that survive today as an example of the talent and vision that Johnson had. He lived the blues and, by some accounts, died because of the blues and Robert Johnson is the place where most blues is said to have come from.
Jimi Hendrix
For some reason Jimi Hendrix is never given his due as the master guitar blues player that he was because many people cannot see past his use of sound and energy on the electric guitar. But everything Jimi did was based in the blues and many of his more popular songs are simply blues songs done Jimi’s way and there is nothing wrong with that.
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The Blues
There’s a telling subtext to this retrospective of Eric Clapton blues sides. Culled from recordings cut between 1970 (the Layla sessions) and 1980 (when Clapton cut his final Polydor album, Another Ticket), these sides finds EC exploring his beloved blues while in a fragile state of mind and body. After all, he was on heroin when he concocted Layla, and though he kicked that habit in the early ’70s, he continued to test his tolerance for alcohol throughout the decade. When you t [Read More...]
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Learn To Play Blues Guitar
It is not that easy to pull out a definition of blues. You can tell that Robert Johnsons’ Rambling on My Mind or B.B. King’s Everyday I Have the Blues is definitely blues, but what about van Halen, Al Di Meola or Pavarotti’s songs?
Of course, you could define the blues by the call-response structure, the dominant 7th chords, the shuffle rhythm, the I-IV-V progression and things like these, but the most complete definition is one that Eric Clapton himself gave to blues music in an interview in 1998:
My definition of Blues is that it’s a musical form which is very disciplined and structured coupled with a state of mind, and you can have either of those things but it’s the two together that make it what it is. And you need to be a student for one, and a human being for the other, but those things alone don’t do it. (Eric Clapton, 1998)
The Blues History
There are many books on the history of blues. It was born in the 20th century’s Mississippi Delta in the U.S., short after the Civil War. This music style was played by slaves and white people referred to it as sorrow songs, plantation songs or workaday songs. The term blues was used for the first time around 1925.
It is believed that the band leader William Christopher Handy was the one to write the first blues songs in 1909, which was later printed and documented. The song was initially called Memphis Blues and got the name of Mister Crump later. He got his inspiration from a blues song he heard in the Mississippi railway station six years earlier. W.C. Handy wrote other songs too, such as Beale Street Blues or St. Louis Blues and nowadays there’s a blues award named after him – the W.C. Handy Award.
What Do You Need To Learn To Play Blues Guitar?
In order to learn to play blues guitar, there are a few things you need. First of all, you need to own an electric or acoustic guitar with strings made from other than nylon in standard tuning. You also need to know how to read tablature, as well as have some basic guitar knowledge and know how to play a few chords.
You also need some Eric Clapton CDs with blues classics, such as Blues Breakers, From the Cradle or Eric Clapton Unplugged and a good CD player with an auto-repeat shuffle. There’s also a plug-in for Winamp you can use to slow down music. A small chord book you can find in any guitar shop is also handy. But most importantly, in order to learn to play blues guitar, you need some good ears.
If you already have some basic guitar knowledge, you can learn to play blues guitar on your own, with the aid of a simple chord book. However, finding a blues guitar teacher who is willing to help you learn to play blues guitar in your area is definitely a good thing. If you have the time and money to take up private lessons, this will probably help improving your guitar playing skills.
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