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Join me as I take a look into some practical tips and advice about mastering blues guitar. We’ll be analysing what the fundamentals of blues are as well as the importance of improvisation, and the benefits of rehearsing with guitar backing tracks.

Blues guitar is one of the most artistically expressive forms of guitar that exists today. Blues is the foundation for a variety of different genres that are extremely popular today, including rock, hard rock, metal, and even some hip hop music. There is a lot involved in mastering blues guitar, and it takes a lot of time and dedication to be able to do it.

In order to be able to master blues guitar you have to know the fundamentals of blues music itself. Blues music is one of the only styles of music to actually have a scale named after it. Learning and mastering the blues scale is one of the first key steps to completely mastering blues guitar playing. The blues scale is used in more than blues music. There is a lot of rock music that uses this scale. So whether you plan on being a blues guitarist or not, this scale is very beneficial to learn and master.

So What Is The 12 Bar Blues?

The 12-bar blues progression is the main foundation and cornerstone of the vast majority of blues tunes out there. As such, to start playing blues, you will need to understand what a 12-bar blues progression is.

The underlying concept of the 12-bar blues is the I-IV-V progression, where I, IV and V represent the chords or notes that you will be using. To this, you will no doubt have two questions that spring to mind immediately, “what is I-IV-V,” and how do I use it?”

Let me explain what I-IV-V is all about When you play a blues progression, you will only be required to use 3 chords. The main principle of I-IV-V let you know what are the chords to use, as follows: a slightly oversimplified approach, which happens to work for the keys of A,C,D,E and G, which is enough for right now, is to simply count out the letters of the alphabet starting with the key you’re playing in. The first, fourth and fifth letter you count represent the chords that you will be using in your blues progression.

For the key of A we count: A-b-c-D-E-f-g

Thus, for the key of A, we will be using A-D-E as our I-IV-V progression. Similarly if you count out starting with E, you will find that for the key of E we will use E-A-B as our I-IV-V.

Music theory students refer to the I as the “tonic”, the IV as the “subdominant”, and the V as the “dominant”. I will not use these terms in this lesson, but knowing that may help you understand what other people are talking about sometimes.

Chords and Progressions

Another key element to blues is to learn the chords and chord progressions that are commonly used in blues guitar. Learning these will help you to create your own blues progressions and melodies. It’s important to remember that not all blues music is played at fast speeds. Some blues music is played slowly and soulfully. It’s as if you can see inside of the guitarist’s soul as he tells a story with his music. Accuracy is the foundation of playing solid, soul-bearing blues music, and not just raw speed.

An integral part of playing and mastering blues guitar is learning how to improvise. After you master the scales and chords, it’s time to put them into practice. Improvising is where your creativity and knowledge come together to create passionate blues music. There are a variety of different improvisation techniques that you should practice along with learning your chords and scales.

One of the better ways to fully master blues guitar music is to practice with blues guitar backing tracks. These blues backing tracks can improve the productivity of your practice time immensely. It’s like practicing with an entire professional blues band, which will help you develop your improvisation as you put to use your knowledge and solo over the backing tracks. Ensure that you are getting access to professionally recorded blues backing tracks such as those from 50Blues Studios. Do not settled for midi backing tracks. Using professional backing tracks will produce good, solid structure and timing as you learn to play along with other musicians, and learn to play over key changes. Properly using blues guitar backing tracks are the secret to success in mastering blues guitar.

Learning how to play and improvise great blues riffs and licks s is not as easy as it might seem to a novice but the one good thing is that focused learning and practicing with a great blues backing track will help a lot in understanding blues chords and progression.

Using Blues backing tracks are important aspect of playing blues lead. Blues is considered to be one of the origins of jazz music and you will find some influence of blues even in contemporary jazz. Most of the blues music and the ones used in popular blues backing tracks are pentatonic scales and the mixolydian scales. These scales can be used in rock too and hence the ones used for blues are enhanced with the blues notes. If you understand the basic of the blue notes then you will be able to use blues backing tracks with ease. Basically, blue notes use a drop in the pitch of the 3rd, 5th and 7th of the major scale. If you hear a pro talk about a blues scale then what they really mean is the pentatonic minor scale with a blue note like b5.

There are many people who jam to blues backing tracks in the C key and the chords used could be C, C7, G7, and F7. If th tracks are meant for a solo then the Am pentatonic scale will be rather useful and perfect to a certain degree. Some of the other options of blues guitar backing tracks include C-minor pentatonic comprising of the c-blues scale and c-major and Bb major scales in Dorian mode.

Blues Chords and Progression

Here are some characteristics of the blues chords and progression, which will unquestionably help you to play great blues guitar effectively:

Most of the blues chord progressions are in a 12 bar form. Apart from this, you will also find 14, 16, 24 or even higher number of bar forms for blues. The tonic chord in blues progression is basically the dominant 7th chord. The blues music has been predominantly defined not only as music that focuses on chord changes as well as scales but also on feeling. There are 3 basic chords in blues and they are all dominant 7th chords.

Some of the blues backing tracks techniques include:

Using hammer-on or even a slide right from b3 to natural 3 Mixing the Mixolydian scale with the dominant blues scale

Mixing scales is probably the best way of enhancing blues backing tracks techniques and some of them are:

Blues Tabs

In the first part, you need to use the C Mixolydian scale with a natural 3. In the second half of the 2nd bar, you need to use the C-minor pentatonic scale using a flat 3. If you really want to pursue blues backing tracks techniques then the best place to learn is by listening to recording of blues guitarists or legends like BB King and Stevie Ray Vaughan. You can also listen to some of the compositions of famous jazz guitarists like Kenny Burrell and George Benson.

Heal cold sores in a hurry using these proven methods. If you will let me, I will give you some great ideas you can use today to speed heal cold sores.

To heal cold sores, you will find there are but two basic methods. Either method can be used alone. However, using both at the same time will give you the best outcome when you want to heal cold sores.

Yes, your body knows how to heal cold sores by itself. But it could take up to four weeks or longer. Who wants to go through that long and painful process when you can easily cure it in half the time?

If you want to heal cold sores as quickly as possible, it is important to understand the underlying cause of the outbreak. Perhaps you know, but let us touch on it briefly for those that do not.

The herpes simplex virus is the culprit. It cannot create new virus by itself. It must use a body cell. It enters that cell and forces it to create the virus. Once the cell is full to capacity, it ruptures open to release the new virus particles.

When you see the swelling, you know thousands of cells are infected and creating new virus. Then, all these cells burst open to spill out the new clones and a new cold sore ulcer is born. It is quite fortunate that all this occurs only on the surface.

Following are the two methods you must choose from – if you want to quickly heal cold sores.

1. INTERNAL REMEDIES ARE AN EXCELLENT WAY TO HEAL COLD SORES.

Do you get more than one cold sore a year? If so, your first priority should be to take a top-rate vitamin and mineral supplement every single day.

Believe it – this is a very powerful and effective cold sore remedy. The virus cannot get any traction when your immune system is strong and is not weakened by daily stress.

In addition to a daily multi-vitamin regimen, taking lysine supplements during an outbreak will stop, or slow down, the virus replication process.

Many folks use lysine capsules for convenience, but high lysine foods will help too. During a cold sore event, 2000 to 5000 milligrams of lysine per day is safe and quite effective.

The sooner you stop the virus from replicating, the quicker you will heal cold sores.

If you suffer from re-occurring outbreaks, quite likely you are starving from calcium deficiency. Your body needs calcium to keep your body alkaline and highly oxygenated. Viruses cannot operate in a high alkaline body.

Most good vitamin supplements already contain 1000 milligrams of calcium per day. You may want to take an additional 1000 to 2000 milligrams daily on top of that.

2. HEAL COLD SORES WITH EXTERNAL TREATMENTS.

The most common way to heal cold sores is with a good topical cold sore treatment. This can be a salve, ointment, oil or lotion. The direct approach produces the fastest results, by far.

Ointments that contain zinc, either in the form of sulfate or gluconate, work very well when applied to the sore. Watch out for other forms of zinc, such as zinc oxide, as they do not absorb readily.

Essential oils, such as garlic or olive oil, are great cold sore treatments. They will stop any virus in its tracks when placed directly on the infected area. Faster healing will then be the result.

Your sore enters the healing phase right after it bursts open. Ice will give you blessed comfort but will slow down healing. It is better to use a warm tea-bag anytime you want to speed heal cold sores.

Cleaning the outbreak regularly with hydrogen peroxide or alcohol is essential to prevent spreading the infection or re-occurrence of the same sore. It also prevents the chance of bacterial infection.

As stated at the beginning – your body knows how to heal cold sores without any extra help. But that is no reason for you to suffer any longer than necessary. The methods you have just read will greatly reduce the time of healing.

Imagine eliminating the embarrassing and painful sore in less time than ever before. Plus, you can now reduce the number of future outbreaks.

You will find using both internal and external remedies, in combination, will provide you the highest level of success when you want to aggressively heal cold sores.