Blues Guitar For Dummies. Jon Chappell
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Название: Blues Guitar For Dummies
Автор: Jon Chappell
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Музыка, балет
isbn: 9781119748960
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The low-fi acoustic guitar
Early blues musicians weren’t professional musicians. They were ordinary working people who created their instruments out of household items: washboards, spoons, pails, and so on. If you were a little more industrious, you could fashion a homemade guitar out of bailing wire, a broom handle, and a cigar box. Those fortunate enough to acquire an actual guitar would probably have an inexpensive acoustic guitar, perhaps picked up secondhand. As the blues became more popular, many musicians could make a living by traveling around to work camps and juke joints (which were roadside places without electricity that offered liquor, dancing, gambling, and sometimes prostitution) playing acoustic guitars and singing the blues for the weary working folk.
The semi-hollowbody electric guitar
Gradually, the different preferences of electric jazz and blues players started to diverge, with jazz players preferring the deeper hollowbody guitars and blues players choosing the thinner-bodied hollow guitars and the semi-hollowbody guitars. (The all-solid-wood guitar, or solidbody, hadn’t been invented yet.) Many people consider the semi-hollowbody guitar, such as the Gibson ES-335, to be the ideal type of blues guitar. Driving this choice was the fact that the thinner guitars didn’t feed back (produce unwanted, ringing tones through the amp) as much as the deeper-bodied guitars, and because blues players generally like to play louder than jazz players, feedback was more of a concern.
Solidbody electric guitars
Though pioneering rock guitarists like Scotty Moore with Elvis and Danny Cedrone with Bill Haley and the Comets were still playing hollowbody guitars, when rock ’n’ roll hit town in the mid-1950s, some people were playing solidbody guitars, blues players included. Two of the most popular solidbody models, the Fender Stratocaster (Figure 1-1a) and the Gibson Les Paul (Figure 1-1b), were both released in the mid-’50s and are still as popular as ever and represent two different approaches to the solidbody guitar. Figure 1-1 shows these two guitars side by side.
FIGURE 1-1: The Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul.
The Collision of Two Worlds: Acoustic versus Electric
Electric guitars came on the scene only in the late 1930s, and then only to those who could afford them. Thus, the acoustic guitar in blues had a long run, and the style continued even after the advent of the more-popular electric guitar. The acoustic guitar remained popular for other types of music (mainly folk and country), but for blues, the electric was the instrument of choice from about 1940 on.
Today, both acoustic and electric guitar blues exist. In fact, there are several sub-genres in each. Acoustic guitar includes
Bottleneck or slide guitar
Instrumental blues
Singer-songwriter blues
Electric blues has two huge offshoots:
Traditional electric blues, as practiced today by Robert Cray, Buddy Guy, and B.B. King
Blues rock, which was started in the 1960s by British electric guitarists and continues on through Eric Clapton and John Mayer
Today, acoustic and electric blues each offer a guitarist a world of history, repertoire, styles, instruments, techniques, and heroes to study and emulate. It’s no longer a conflict of “go electric or be a front-porch picker,” as it may have seemed in the late 1930s. Many players, Eric Clapton being a notable example, are excellent acoustic-blues players and have paid tribute in concert and in recordings to their acoustic blues roots.
Getting a Grip on How Guitars Work
To understand why the guitar works so well for the blues, you must first understand how guitars work in the first place. In the next sections, take a look at how guitars produce their tone and how your approach to them makes them so expressive.
You’ve gotta use your hands — both of them
Of course, you play any instrument with your hands, but in the guitar, the two hands perform different tasks — unlike the piano or saxophone where both hands engage in the same kind of action. In a guitar, one hand strikes the strings (usually the right hand), and one hand decides what pitch to sound through fretting. The left hand’s job doesn’t end with just fretting, either. It has additional functions, too, when it comes to connecting notes together through slurs (covered in Chapter 10), which it can do without the right hand. The left hand is also responsible for two very important blues guitar techniques: vibrato and string bending (also discussed in Chapter 10).