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
isbn:
1 Move your body in time to the music.Getting down not only makes you look cool, but also it reinforces the rhythms of the music and your instrument with the parts of your body. That’s essential for internalizing the music and making it your own, instead of a mechanical execution of technique. If you feel self-conscious about writhing around like a contortionist in public, try at first just moving your head along in time to the playing.
2 Close your eyes, open them, and squint occasionally.
3 Make little facial expressions when you play a soulful bend.Watch the greats when they play, especially B.B. King. One of B.B. King’s wives once described the look he sometimes gets on his face when playing as if he was eating a lemon.
Blues Trivia For Dummies
How much do you know about blues guitar? Take this simple test to find out. The following 5 questions test your knowledge of the genre. If you don’t know the right answers, don’t worry — read this book and you’ll end up a soulful, jiving, blues-playing machine (not that you aren’t in some way already).
The questions
1 By what name does B.B. King refer to his six-string soul mate (that is, his guitar)?BessieMaybellineLucilleLola
2 The famed Mississippi Delta, birthplace of the blues, is where, exactly?At the mouth of the Mississippi River, in southern LouisianaIn northwest Mississippi and southwest ArkansasIn central Mississippi, in and around the capital, JacksonIn southern Mississippi and western Louisiana, along the Gulf Coast
3 The legend of the “Crossroads” in blues lore describes what?The place where the blues was bornA decision blues performers make when they decide to play the bluesWhere Robert Johnson met the devil and traded his soul for talentAn intersection in Memphis, famous in blues history because many performers crossed paths there
4 What are “blue” notes?Notes that singers intone that are in between “real” notesSad notes that make major sounds into minor onesThe interval of the flatted 3rd, the flatted 7th, and the flatted 5thAll of the above
5 What is “mojo”?A skill that enables you to make lucrative investments in the stock marketA quality that the opposite sex finds irresistible in youA play on the French phrase “mot juste” for “apt word choice”A type of illicit liquor or “moonshine”
The answers
1 C
2 B
3 C
4 D
5 B
Chapter 2
Blues Meets Guitar: A Match Made in Musical Heaven
IN THIS CHAPTER
The guitar and blues go together like apple and pie — as if they were made for each other. And you could argue that they were. The guitar allows you to sing along with yourself (try that with a flute), and singing was the way the blues started. And it’s much easier to bring out on the front porch than a piano. It’s cheaper to own (or make yourself) than many other instruments, and that helped bring the blues to many poor folks — the people who really had the blues.
As the blues developed, guitar makers adopted features that helped bring out the qualities of the blues to even better effect. An electric guitar is played with two hands and leaves your mouth free to sing (as an acoustic does), but electrics, with their skinnier strings, are easier to bend (a way of stretching the string while it’s ringing, producing a gradual, continuous rise in pitch), and electronic amplification helps project the guitar’s sound out into the audience of (often raucous and noisy) blues-loving listeners. In this chapter, I show you in detail why the blues and the guitar — both acoustic and electric — make great music together.
Because the blues was concentrated in the rural South, in the time before musical instruments adopted electricity, the earliest blues guitar music was played on acoustics. The “Delta blues” style was the first recognized style of the blues and consisted of strummed and plucked acoustic guitars with chords formed the same way as in other forms of folk music.
Beyond the Delta: Defining the Blues Guitar Sound
Blues guitar can take many forms, and has grown dramatically since its humble beginnings in the south-central United States. Blues players of this time were largely self taught (and many of them illiterate), and one of the easiest ways to create different chords was to tune the guitar to an open chord, such as G major or E major, and then use a metal or glass slide (a pocket knife or bottle neck) to change chords. In both slide and fretted guitar styles, guitarists would emphasize the driving rhythm of the blues by thumping out steady bass notes on the low strings with their thumb while in turn, or simultaneously, fingerpicking upper strings to sound out chords, melodic riffs, and fills.
Playing simple chords to back up a blues singer is still a form of blues guitar — as is playing chords with a slide. You can’t help but sound bluesy when you move a slide from one position to another to play the different chords in a song — especially if you do it expressively. But beyond this, you can ascribe certain musical hallmarks to the blues that don’t make you play any more soulfully but provide you with a deeper understanding when you hear the blues.
In the following sections, I’ve broken down the elements of the blues into four musical concepts. Keep in mind that these concepts are the main ones and there are certainly more, but thinking of and listening to the blues while considering these criteria helps in your understanding of this sometimes elusive music form. You may not be able to define the blues, but you’ll know it when you hear it. Or as Sonny Terry says:
Sometimes I want to holler,
Sometimes I want to shout,