Electric Blues Basics

Because the blues laid the foundation for rock and roll and jazz, every aspiring electric guitarist, regardless of the style of music he prefers, will benefit from learning to play the blues. This guide covers everything from basic rhythm and blues patterns to blues licks, scales, bends, and much more. You’ll be playing like the greats in no time.

Before you begin to play the blues, you need to know how to play scales, starting with the major scale. Learning to play the major scale and how to transpose its scale pattern will make it much easier to pick up the blues scales you’ll learn later in this guide.

Look at the G major scale below. The 1st (root) note is G and is called the 1st degree of the scale. The 2nd note is A and is known as the 2nd degree of the scale. The degrees of the scale continue on through B, C, D, E, and F, until you reach G again. This G is the same as the root note, only it’s one octave higher. In simple terms, the notes of the G major scale look like this:

Below is a common, one-octave fingering for the G major scale. The red dots indicate the root (or G notes), and the black dots are the other scale tones.

Transposing is the process of moving music from one key to another. You can transpose scales, chord progressions, licks, and so on. The major scale pattern you just learned can be transposed easily by moving the root note to another location on the fretboard. Whenever you move a scale to a different location on the fingerboard, the degree numbers will remain the same, but the key will be different. For example, if you move the G major scale you just learned so that it starts at the 8th fret (instead of the 3rd fret), the root note would be C instead of G. Therefore, the scale would be a C major scale, as shown below.

Learning to transpose is an essential skill for every musician. For guitarists, transposing begins with learning the notes on the guitar’s fretboard, as explained below.

Below is a fingerboard chart showing the 6th-string fret notes. Memorizing these notes is vital because doing so will allow you to transpose any scale that has a root note on the 6th string.

There are other notes on the fretboard that occur on the frets in between the notes in the previous diagram. These notes are called accidentals and are further classified as sharps () and flats (). You’ll notice that each of these notes may be known by either a sharp name or a flat name. For example, A is the same note as B because A is one fret (half step) higher than A, and B is one fret (half step) lower than B. The space between B and C and the space between E and F are already half steps, so there aren’t any sharps or flats between either of these two sets of adjacent notes.

Below you’ll see a full fingerboard chart, which looks very dense at first glance. Don’t let this worry you. It’s not necessary to memorize all of these notes in order to play electric blues guitar. Instead, you’ll use this as a reference chart whenever you need to figure out the notes on a specific fret and string. In time, you will come to know all of the fingerboard notes without having to refer to this chart.