Blues Guitar tabs lesson

One of the best ways to get into guitar playing is by playing blues guitar, which is an essential background for all contemporary music in rock, blues, funk and jazz styles. The guitar tab shown here is a common and easy 12-Bar blues.

Guitar tab is explained in my other hubs, but it gives each string on guitar its own line, with the thickest and lowest sounding string as the bottom line. Then the numbers tell you which fret to play, or 0 for an open string. When notes are stacked like this, you play two notes together.

• Instead of the single notes you could play each one twice, leading to a shuffle rhythm, which goes - humpty-dumpty, humpty-dumpty. The chords in the last few bars should be played four times each. If you find the single-note run in bar 12 too difficult, leave it out for now and play B7 four times.
• A 12-Bar blues in the most basic form only uses three chords - the I, IV and V chords in the key. As we are playing in the key of E, these chords would be E7, A7 and B7. You could play these chords with the riffs shown in the guitar tab, or instead of them.

You could use the E blues scale to improvise over these chords. String 1 is the thinnest string.

String 1 : 3rd fret, open string

String 2: 3rd fret, open string

String 3 : 3, 2, 0

String 4: 2, 0

String 5: 2, 1, 0

String 6: 3, 0