Blues Guitar For Dummies. Jon Chappell

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СКАЧАТЬ where the hands work the same way. In guitar playing, the left-hand fingers press down the strings at different frets, which creates different sounding pitches — the note names like A, C, F♯, B♭, and so on. But the left hand doesn’t make the sound.

The right hand is what actually produces the sound — by strumming or plucking the strings. The left hand make no sound on its own, but decides what pitches will be heard when the right hand plays. The right hand can make sound, but it can’t make organized, intelligent sound without the left hand providing the right notes to play. So the two hands need each other, and they must coordinate their efforts so that they move together to create chords and single notes in rhythm. In blues guitar playing, unlike large governmental bureaucracies, the right hand must know what the left hand is doing, and vice versa.

      Lines guide your left-hand fingers

      Look at the guitar’s fingerboard (the top of the neck; refer to Figures 2-3 and 2-4) and you see a gridlike structure of strings and frets (short metal wires underneath the strings, running perpendicular to them). Frets are like the black and white keys of the piano: They provide all the different pitches available on the guitar in half-step increments. Good guitar players, who “know the fingerboard,” can identify any string/fret location by its pitch (note name), no matter where it falls. The better guitar player you become the more you’re able to look at the neck and quickly see notes and patterns.

      Shifting acoustic to overdrive: Electric guitars

      As soon as electric guitars were available, blues players of the day made the transition quickly and easily from their acoustic versions. An electric guitar uses the same approach to neck and frets and the way the left and right hands share separate but equally important roles (see the preceding section for the basics), but it provides some aspects that the acoustic guitar can’t do or can’t do as well, in addition to the most obvious advantage: increased volume through electronic amplification. The amplified electric guitar certainly changed the music world, but in many more ways than just being able to be heard over the rest of the band. The entire tonal character changed, in addition to the way you had to play it.

Technologically speaking, an electric guitar is no more complicated than an eighth-grade science project: A wire (the string) hovers over a magnet (the pickup), which forms a magnetic field. When you set the wire in motion (by plucking it), the vibrating, or oscillating, string creates a disturbance in the magnetic field, which produces an electrical current. This current travels down a cord (the one sticking out the side of your guitar) and into an amplifier, where it’s cranked up to levels that people can hear — and in some cases, really hear. Figure 2-5 shows a close-up of the sound-producing parts of an electric guitar: the string and pickup.

      FIGURE 2-5: The makers of electric sound, reporting for duty.

Naturally, there’s a lot more to the way electric guitars make music than what I describe here, but what’s significant is that an electric guitar doesn’t make its sound acoustically. Even though you can hear the string when the guitar’s not plugged in, that’s not what the guitar “hears.” The guitar converts a disturbance in the pickup’s magnetic field to a current. This all-electronic process is different than “pre-electric guitar amplification,” which consisted of placing a microphone in front of a guitar.

      

In an electric guitar, you must use metal strings, because nylon ones don’t have magnetic properties. The fact that you need only a metal wire and a pickup to make sound — rather than a resonating chamber — meant electric guitars could be built differently from their acoustic counterparts. And they were played differently, though that took some time to evolve.

      Going easy on your pluckers (or strummers)

Many people think that the only difference between electric guitars and acoustic guitars is that the electric versions plug into an amp and are louder. While that’s true, it’s not the only difference. As a player, what you notice as soon as you pick up an electric guitar is how easy it is to play. As far as physical effort is concerned, electric guitars are much easier because

       The neck is shallower.

       The fingerboard width is thinner.

       The strings are lighter than those found on an acoustic.

       The action, or distance from the strings to the frets, is lower, so it frets almost effortlessly.

      But the lighter strings have another advantage crucial to blues playing, other than being easier to play: They’re easier to bend.

Bending strings allows electric guitarists to be more expressive in their lead playing, and to allow the guitar to better emulate the vocal stylings of blues singers, who used their flexible approach to pitch to play blues notes. Figure 2-6 shows what it looks like to bend a string on an electric. The string is physically pushed sideways on the fretboard by the left hand, stretching it.

      FIGURE 2-6: A left-hand string bend stretches the string, causing it to rise in pitch.

      Getting your sounds to be loud and lingering

The primary reason that everyone grabbed electric guitars was for amplification. Electric guitars could be electronically amplified, making the sound heard over the rest of the band, and offering the player a more controllable solution than placing a microphone on an acoustic guitar.

      In the process of electrifying a guitar, blues players noticed something else that was different, too: Electric guitars sustained longer. The notes just seemed to hang on longer instead of dying away quickly, as they did on acoustic guitars and banjos before that. As a result of this increased sustain, electric guitars were able to produce more substantial vibrated notes, bent notes, and long notes that held their sound. Along with jazz players, blues players found they could now more closely emulate vocal and horn stylings. This change encouraged a more versatile approach to single-note, or lead, playing. Before the electric version, the guitar was largely a rhythm instrument, with some notable exceptions, such as the jazz playing of gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt.

What You Need to Get Your Groove On

      To be a well-appointed blues guitar player, you need to have not only your acoustic or electric guitar, but also you need other stuff that allows you to play. Check out this list:

       Picks: Being able to play with a pick is an important skill, and you should learn to play with one before deciding to be a rebel and go without. (Some traditional players of both acoustic and electric blues don’t use a pick. They use the unadorned fingers of the right hand to produce all their blues sounds, from full strummed chords to riffs to leads.)

       Strap СКАЧАТЬ