This is from Jimmy’s upcoming “Ultimate Acoustic Blues” – available on Oct 16th!
Build Your Blues Guitar Vocabulary
I really want to build-up, help you build-up a vocabulary
of licks. As I mentioned before, when I’ve gotten comments
back from my acoustic products, various acoustic products,
and everybody says, oh, give me some more acoustic blues.
A couple of ways you can approach an A shuffle like that.
One is the little — had a little bit more of a driving wheel
kind of… Now here you’ve got various places you could go.
You could keep that thing going… Sounds good.
That’s one approach.
Another approach to this same sort of — this is still an A shuffle,
but if you wanted to go more of an inside feel, something like
keeping your thumb going, like, I know we’ve been talking about
the dead thumb. There’s that. So that’s a little more subtle
finger style. Same groove though. Here I went to a D7th. I love
this move. It’s still a D7th. Back to your A7th; E7th. That’s
the same walkdown I did earlier. Remember the E one? But I did
it in A. There are several ways you could do that. Or you could
go — here’s a cool folk one. Almost jazzy, isn’t it? That’s
just an A7th and then a D major, D minor, A major, A7th and
then you go sharp 5. Then the other one was the… Similar
to… Slightly different voicing though. This is a chromatic
7th walkdown. Or… That’s also common. You don’t have to
put the 7th in there.
So these are all little — I’m trying to basically give you a vocabulary of your
own. Because what I want to encourage you to do is go ahead and play
with your friends or use this. I’m going to find a way to send you guys
my backing tracks. Actually, I’m going to do that. I haven’t told these
guys yet, but we’re going to do it. We’re going to make that happen
for you.
So what I’m going to do is take all the tracks that I’ve recorded here
during this course and I’m going to make it available to you through
Guitar Control and that way you’ll have them and you can take my lessons
that you just learned from watching me. You’ll have your own version of
loops. You can make your own, too. But I want to make sure you have yours
because I’ve got to ask for that and I just remembered I think I need to
make that available to you. So, I will.
So lastly, as I mentioned before, I was kind of playing around in A during
my loop thing. I did a thing where I actually made the change of the D chord,
little 7th riff. Now you’ll notice I’m doing a lot of hammering-on. That seems
to be a common technique that seems to work well on the blues, whether it’s a
rhythm thing… See that hammer-on? All those little half-step moves seem to
work well in the blues. Very — kind of motorize the thing, you know?
