We guitarists love our moment to shine, when we get to that part of the song when we step into the spotlight and wow the crowd with our insane soloing skills! Sure, it takes a huge amount of time, practice and dedication to get to that level of ability. But how much of our practice time do we spend on our rhythm guitar skills; the ‘meat and potatoes’ of what we do? In a ‘regular’ band, with songs and vocals, we’ll probably spend more time ‘in the background’, playing rhythm and backing up the singer or another soloist, and not doing so ourselves. So it’s just as important that our rhythm guitar skills get the attention they deserve.
In this month’s feature, we’re looking at how these skills apply to blues, by presenting you with five separate 12-bar style blues tunes that have a distinct rhythm focus.
The angle we’re going with is from the perspective of a three-piece band (guitar, bass and drums), and what the guitar could play from a rhythm point of view, keeping things rhythmically solid, but with enough variation in techniques and approaches to provide musical interest. It’s amazing how far we can go without venturing into full blown ‘guitar solo’ territory.
First, let’s get to know some of the different rhythmic approaches we could encounter with blues. Probably the most widely used is the overall idea of the ‘swing feel’ – the concept of eighth notes (“one & two & three & four &) not being played equidistantly from each other, as is musically ‘correct’ (this is known as a ‘straight’ feel), but where the offbeat (the ‘&’) is pushed closer to the following beat; this gives us our distinctive ‘rolling’ feel that characterises this genre. (To appreciate the swung eighth-note feel, say the words, “humpty dumpty, humpty dumpty” etc).
There can be different levels of swing, measured by how far away the offbeat gets from its midway point, and although this can be explained technically, it’s all about feeling it and sitting in right with the rest of the band. When applied to different tempos, the swing feel can become anything from an emotive slow ballad-style blues to a fast foot-tapping boogie rhythm that makes you want to throw inhibition to the wind and hit the dance floor.
Within this area of swing rhythm in the context of blues guitar, there are various approaches like, ‘boogie woogie’, ‘boogie’, ‘swing’ and ‘shuffle’ that can be identified
