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By Pete Madsen
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Kick-start your next jam session with these three guitar parts
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Tune Up
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Lots of guitarists love to jam on the blues. And why not? The ingredients are simple: a 12-bar (12-measure) repeating chord progression and the five-note minor pentatonic scale to start soloing. And once you master the basics, there are endless possibilities. The simplicity of the arrangement allows the player to focus on the subtleties of tone, timing, and rhythmic flourishes. Believe me, after many years of playing blues, I still find challenges in the music.
Often when guitarists get together to play blues, they take turns soloing and playing the same rhythm. This works great when there are just two of you. When there are two or more guitarists playing rhythm, however, you can make the music sound a lot more exciting by playing a rhythm part that complements the other players’ parts. The key word is complements. You want to play something that either accentuates some element of the other part or differentiates itself so that the two parts lock into a groove.
The blues is derived in part from African musical traditions. In African tribal music, the overall rhythm can be pretty complex. When you boil the rhythms down to the individual parts, each one can be relatively simple. It’s how they all fit together. If you keep this mindset—working your part into the whole—when working on new guitar parts, your music will be more interesting to listen to and more fun to play.
If you’re not familiar with the 12-bar blues, don’t worry. After this lesson, you’ll have a good grasp of the rhythm and structure of the form, and you can move on to some basic blues lead, such as “Lead Licks” from the Summer 2005 issue of Play Guitar!. The 12-bar blues format, although it has many variations, is basically three chords played over a 12-bar repeating sequence.
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