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Blues guitar basics -- “Slide it in”
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BB King, most modern Blues stems from his style of Electric Blues
"The Blues are dirty. The Blues are sexy. Everything about them spells sin. That’s why, to play the Blues, you gotta slide it in.” One of my guitar teachers said that to me, and while the creepiness factor of saying that to a teenage boy is rather high, the feeling still stands.
Pedophilic quotes aside, This lesson will show you how to get that raunchy slide sound with just your fingers and some attitude.
Sliding is the signature sound of Blues guitar, but you don‘t need to play slide guitar to get it. W.C. Handy, the “father of the Blues,” found the inspiration of the Blues while waiting at a train station in Mississippi. He heard a guitarist sitting around “plunking a guitar beside me while I slept... As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars....The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard (W.C. Handy).” The first notes of the Blues were played by sliding with a knife.
You’ll probably notice that many of the older bluesmen -- such as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James (not to mention newer ones like Bonnie Raitt and the great Sonny Landreth)-- play slide, but you don’t have to play slide to play the Blues.
The technique is simple: at the beginning of a lick, start a fret before the note you want to play and slide up. For example, if you want to play an “A,” pick at “A flat” and slide your finger to “A.” It will sound vaguely like a person singing, which is the sound you are going for.
Once you master this, you can begin to work it into your riffs and solos.
In figure 1, you’ll see how I mixed in the slide to emphasize certain notes, such as the root (the A). This creates a little bit of tension before resolving to the root.
Whatever notes you want to emphasize are up to you, I tend to slide on the Root, the flatted 3rd, and the flatted 7th, but it sounds good everywhere as long as you don’t over do it. As dirty as the Blues are, you don’t want to turn them into a sloppy mess.
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