If you are a blues music enthusiast then for sure your guitar experience can really take on a new dimension if you start learning how to play blues guitar.

The mournful haunting and melancholic sadness embedded so deeply in the sound of blues guitar music finds its roots in the labours of the Afro American labour gangs working in the Deep South of the USA at the back end of the nineteenth century.

The sound of the blues is a reflection of the easy rhythmic sounds of the spiritual calls and the chanting of the work songs of a people coming to terms with their own enslavement and the uncompromising hardship of their new way of life in a far away place.

As you learn how to play blues guitar you will get an tremendous personal pleasure from the strumming of those easy rhythms and moving melodies but more than that those who are there to hear you play will be captivated by the mood that the playing of the blues creates. 

There can be no more satisfying style than the blues for the would be guitarist to learn how to play. You will learn how to play blues guitar as much with your heart and with your ears as you will from learning guitar technique . It will not take you too long to get the feel of playing the blues and you will soon become engrossed in its magic once you start your learning process.

So where do you go to set about learning how to play blues guitar?

To become a great blues guitar player is not something that is likely to happen for you overnight. That doesn't mean though that you cannot learn how to play blues guitar and enjoy a fantastic level of success with the enormous amount of pleasure that playing blues guitar will give you and you can start to do that right now.

There are any number of excellent internet based and physical courses available that can start you on your road to your success in learning how to play blues guitar. 

The trick is of course to find the course that is right for you.

The very best courses are probably those that come with a blend of written and video based instruction. These courses usually contain what are known as Jam-Along sessions. These are music tracks organised such that you can play along either as a band member or as the lead guitarist. Here you can enjoy tremendous fun feeling that you are really playing in a band as a blues guitarist.

The time and effort that you put into learning how to play blues guitar with one of these home learning courses will reward you with a lifelong pleasure experience. Playing the blues is one of the most popular styles of guitar music around today both to play and to listen to.

The good news for you is that you can learn to play blues guitar today, in your own home, at your own pace and at a very realistic price. All you need is the desire a guitar and as much or as little of your spare time as you want to give in order to fulfill your dream.

What Is The Blues?

It is not that easy to pull out a definition of blues. You can tell that Robert Jhonsons' Rambling on My Mind or B.B. King's Everyday I Have the Blues is definitely blues, but what about van Halen, Al Di Meola or Pavarotti's songs? Of course, you could define the blues by the call-response structure, the dominant 7th chords, the shuffle rhythm, the I-IV-V progression and things like these, but the most complete definition is one that Eric Clapton himself gave to blues music in an interview in 1998:

My definition of Blues is that it's a musical form which is very disciplined and structured coupled with a state of mind, and you can have either of those things but it's the two together that make it what it is. And you need to be a student for one, and a human being for the other, but those things alone don't do it. (Eric Clapton, 1998)

The Blues History

There are many books on the history of blues. It was born in the 20th century's Mississippi Delta in the U.S., short after the Civil War. This music style was played by slaves and white people referred to it as sorrow songs, plantation songs or workaday songs. The term blues was used for the first time around 1925.

It is believed that the band leader William Christopher Handy was the one to write the first blues songs in 1909, which was later printed and documented. The song was initially called Memphis Blues and got the name of Mister Crump later. He got his inspiration from a blues song he heard in the Mississippi railway station six years earlier. W.C. Handy wrote other songs too, such as Beale Street Blues or St. Louis Blues and nowadays there's a blues award named after him – the W.C. Handy Award.

What Do You Need To Learn To Play Blues Guitar?

In order to learn to play blues guitar, there are a few things you need. First of all, you need to own an electric or acoustic guitar with strings made from other than nylon in standard tuning. You also need to know how to read tablature, as well as have some basic guitar knowledge and know how to play a few chords.

You also need some Eric Clapton CDs with blues classics, such as Blues Breakers, From the Cradle or Eric Clapton Unplugged and a good CD player with an auto-repeat shuffle. There's also a plug-in for Winamp you can use to slow down music. A small chord book you can find in any guitar shop is also handy. But most importantly, in order to learn to play blues guitar, you need some good ears.

If you already have some basic guitar knowledge, you can learn to play blues guitar on your own, with the aid of a simple chord book. However, finding a blues guitar teacher who is willing to help you learn to play blues guitar in your area is definitely a good thing. If you have the time and money to take up private lessons, this will probably help improving your guitar playing skills.

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