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Introduction

As B.B. King might say, “You’ve got a right to play the blues!” And you’ve taken the first step in exercising your blues rights by getting a copy of Blues Guitar For Dummies. Your blues rights are inalienable — like life, liberty, and the pursuit of mojo. The blues is a form of music and a proclamation on the human condition, delivered proudly and loudly in song. The great thing about the blues is that it’s universal because everyone at one time or another gets the blues.

To help you sort out the many aspects of playing blues guitar, I organized this book to help you in your blues pursuits. The following sections give you an idea of what you’re getting into as you delve into the pages of this book and into the world of the blues!

About This Book

Blues Guitar For Dummies covers all aspects of blues guitar, from playing the instrument to understanding the legends and lore associated with it. This book is for the beginning to intermediate blues guitarist. If you don’t know much about the guitar as an instrument, just hang out with me as I take you through the world of blues guitar. And even if you already own or know something about guitars, you can use the info in this book before you go out and make your next guitar purchase.

To get a meaningful experience from this book, you don’t have to play or own a guitar. You don’t even have to know what kind of guitar you want or what style of playing you want to pursue. This book is designed to help you figure that out. But this book is a guitar book, after all, so I focus on just guitars, guitar playing, and guitarists themselves.

Blues Guitar For Dummies also shows you how to play without requiring that you know how to read music first. Sure, I give you shortcuts in the form of written notation, diagrams, and symbols, but use these written figures as a reference as your specific needs demand.

You should find your own way to absorb the music in this book so you can play it back as your own. Do that through a combination of the elements below:

 Chord diagrams: You form the left-hand chords you need by looking at the diagrams and matching your fingers to the symbols on the guitar’s neck.

 Guitar tablature: Tablature is a type of notation that tells you to finger certain frets on specific strings. No “notes” are involved, just locations on which frets and strings to play. The tab staff appears just below the standard music notation staff. If you can already read music — even just a little — you can always see what note you’re fingering by looking at the staff immediately above the tab.

 The Website (www.dummies.com/go/bluesguitarfd): Playing by ear is important because after you get a good idea of where to place your fingers, you want to let your ears take over. Listening to the audio tracks is important because it shows you how the music sounds, so you can figure out the rhythm of the song and how long to hold notes by listening, not reading. The audio tracks also has some cool features:Provides accompaniment, so you can hear how the examples sound in a band setting — with drums, bass, and rhythm guitar.Enables you to always find the track that corresponds to the printed music example in the chaptersGives you a count-off so that you can play along in time

 The tab staff and music staff: To those of you who do like to read music (you two know who you are), this book delivers in that department, too. The music for many exercises and songs appears in standard music notation, just above the tab staff. You get the best of both worlds: tab showing you where to put your fingers and the corresponding music notation to satisfy all those schooled musicians out there.

Grab a copy of Blues For Dummies (no, I didn’t write it; it was written by Lonnie Brooks, Cub Koda, and Wayne Baker Brooks) for general blues info. Blues Guitar For Dummies is about playing blues guitar, and I devote more pages to playing than I do historical stuff.

Conventions Used in This Book

This book has a number of conventions that I use to make things consistent and easy to understand. Here’s a list of those conventions:

 Right hand and left hand: If you play the guitar as a right-handed person, the right hand strums and picks and the left hand frets. If you’re left-handed, you can either play as a right-handed person, or you can reverse the process. If you choose the second method, remember to convert the terms and that I refer to the right hand and right-hand fingers as the strumming and picking hand and the left hand as the fretting hand. Nothing against lefties, mind you, but it’s easier and shorter to say “right hand” instead of “strumming or picking hand.”

 High and low, up and down: When I say “higher on the neck” or “up the neck,” I refer to the higher-numbered frets, or the region closer to the body of the guitar than the headstock. “Going up” always refers to going up in pitch, which means toward the higher frets or skinnier strings — which happen to be closer to the floor than the ceiling.

 One staff at a time, please: Many of the exercises contain both music notation and tablature. The tab tells you what frets and strings to play; the music tells you the pitches and the rhythms. These ways present the same information in different ways, so you need to look at only one at a time. Pick the one that works best for you.

What You’re Not to Read

Occasionally, you will come across some boxes of text that are shaded gray (also called sidebars). You have my permission to skip over this info. Don’t get me wrong; the info is fun and interesting, but it’s not the most crucial points of blues guitar.

Foolish Assumptions

In this book I make the following assumptions about you:

 You’re an average reader who knows a little something about the guitar or the blues.

 You want to sound like a blues player and take the path that allows you to discover many things about the guitar and music.

 You want to play quickly without a lot of messing around with music theory and all that stuff. You want exactly what you need to know at that moment in time without all the lectures and teacherly instincts.

How This Book Is Organized

I’ve organized the book into seven sections that deal with holding, setting up, and playing the guitar, and then I tackle how to buy a guitar, what to look for in an amp, how effects work, and the major contributors to the blues.

Part 1: You Got a Right to Play the Blues

Part 1 devotes three chapters to the guitar basics that you need to know before you can start playing the blues. Chapter 1 helps you understand blues guitar, the kinds of guitars available, the gear you may need, and the parts of the guitar. In Chapter 2, you discover how the guitar works and the art of fretting. Chapter 3 explains how to hold your guitar, position your right and left hands, how to tune up (which is oh, so important), and how to interpret the written notation throughout the book.

Part 2: Setting Up to Play the Blues

The chapters in Part 2 all deal with playing the guitar (hooray!) and creating music. Chapter 4 presents chords — the easiest way to start playing real music. In Chapter 5, you strike the strings through different strumming patterns, rhythms, and fingerpicking techniques. The overview in Chapter 6 shows how blues songs are structured, and Chapter 7 has you playing real blues music!

Part 3: Beyond the Basics: Playing Like a Pro

Part 3 takes you into the world of the committed guitar student. In Chapter 8, you explore lead guitar, and Chapter 9 takes you into the expressive world of melodic playing. Chapter 10 puts the finishing touches on your lead playing with certain expressive guitar techniques.

Part 4: Sounding Like the Masters: Blues Styles through the Ages

In Part 4 of this book, you find the style chapters, where you get to play blues in all the different styles throughout the blues’ colorful history. You discover the acoustic-based blues from the Mississippi Delta (Chapter 11), history of traditional electric blues (Chapter 12), and the electric blues’ rowdy alter ego, blues rock (Chapter 13).

Part 5: Gearing Up: Outfitting Your Arsenal

In Part 5, you scope out the gear you need to complete your blues rig. Chapter 14 is a handy guitar buyer’s guide that covers everything from evaluating a guitar to shopping strategies to dealing with the music store salespeople. Chapter 15, on amps and their effects, gives you a primer on guitar amps and those little magic boxes (effects) that give your guitar some superhip sounds. In Chapter 16, you find out how to change strings on both acoustic and electric guitars.

Part 6: The Part of Tens

The Part of Tens provides fun and interesting information in a top-ten-style format that rivals those late night talk show hosts’. The chapters in this part prioritize important information by the many blues guitarists and recordings.

Part 7: Appendixes

The appendixes cover important info not contained in the chapters. Appendix A explains reading music, and Appendix B provides an overview of the audio tracks you’ll find on the website at www.dummies.com/go/bluesguitarfd.

Icons Used in This Book

In the margins of this book, you find several helpful little icons that make your journey a little easier:

The remember icon signifies a piece or pieces of information worth remembering. Sounds simple, huh? Some of the info comes up repeatedly.

In the instances that I get all techy on you, I use this icon to mark the explanations that you can skip and come back to later if you want.

This icon highlights info for die-hard blues guitarists (and those in the making). To step up your blues abilities, take the advice in these icons.

This icon is a hands-on, explicit directive that can change your playing from merely extraordinary to really extraordinary.

Pay heed to this one, or you could do damage to something — your ears, your guitar, your audience’s ears, and so on.

Where to Go from Here

Blues Guitar For Dummies can be read straight through like a novel or by individual chapter. Even though each chapter is self-contained, music instruction dictates that certain steps be mastered before others, so Parts 2 and 3 are best experienced in order.

If you’re a beginner, a musical klutz, or someone who really wants to follow the steps, start with Chapter 1 and read the book in sequence. If you already play a little bit, skip to Chapter 3, where I decipher the notation used in the music figures in the book. Then you’re ready for the playing chapters — Chapters 4 through 13. You don’t need to master the E chord in Chapter 3 to appreciate the advice on buying a guitar in Chapter 14. But at some point, I hope you read all the material in this book, even the most obscure trivia.