Читать книгу Blues Guitar For Dummies - Jon Chappell - Страница 34

IN THIS CHAPTER

The roots of blues guitar

What defines blues guitar music

How acoustic and electric guitars each make the blues in their own way

The essential gear you need to play the blues

The guitar and blues go together like apple and pie — as if they were made for each other. And you could argue that they were. The guitar allows you to sing along with yourself (try that with a flute), and singing was the way the blues started. And it’s much easier to bring out on the front porch than a piano. It’s cheaper to own (or make yourself) than many other instruments, and that helped bring the blues to many poor folks — the people who really had the blues.

As the blues developed, guitar makers adopted features that helped bring out the qualities of the blues to even better effect. An electric guitar is played with two hands and leaves your mouth free to sing (as an acoustic does), but electrics, with their skinnier strings, are easier to bend (a way of stretching the string while it’s ringing, producing a gradual, continuous rise in pitch), and electronic amplification helps project the guitar’s sound out into the audience of (often raucous and noisy) blues-loving listeners. In this chapter, I show you in detail why the blues and the guitar — both acoustic and electric — make great music together.

Because the blues was concentrated in the rural South, in the time before musical instruments adopted electricity, the earliest blues guitar music was played on acoustics. The “Delta blues” style was the first recognized style of the blues and consisted of strummed and plucked acoustic guitars with chords formed the same way as in other forms of folk music.