Blues Guitar For Dummies. Jon Chappell

(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.

      

The Gibson ES-335 makes my list of one of the greatest guitars for playing the blues. See Chapter 18 for more of the best guitars on the market.

      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.

      

In the early 1950s, B.B. King tried his hand with a Fender Esquire (similar to a Telecaster) and a Strat, but after he grabbed the thin hollow and semi-hollow Gibson that he named “Lucille,” he never switched back. And Muddy Waters, who played an older, more traditional form of blues, was right in fashion with an early model goldtop Les Paul in the mid-1950s. He eventually settled on his iconic red Telecaster.

      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

      

Acoustics and electrics both produce great blues music, as will virtually any other type of guitar, whether it’s an acoustic nylon-string classical or a purple metallic-flake solidbody with green lightning bolts. The blues is unrestricted when it comes to instruments.

      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.

      

Though you should always strive for the best guitar you can afford, be aware that blues guitarists from Robert Johnson on often played cheap instruments like Stellas, Kalamazoos, and Nationals. Hound Dog Taylor performed timeless slide classics on 1960s Japanese solidbody guitars. Sometimes the funkier the guitar, the funkier the blues can be.

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).

The right hand is the engine that drives the sound. All the rhythm and dynamics (loud and soft sound) rests with the right hand, and you can’t play even moderately fast and clean unless you’ve developed your right-hand technique (check out Chapter 5 for more info). But the training for the right hand is different than from the left. In the end, though, the two must coordinate to create music. (Chapter 4 gives you more info on training the left hand.)

      Producing the tones: String vibration and pitch

      A guitar is a string instrument, related to the violin and cello in that it generates tones by means of a vibrating string. You set the string in motion by striking or plucking it, which causes it to vibrate, which produces a musical pitch. For the sound to be heard by human ears, the vibrating string must be amplified in some way. In acoustic instruments, the body acts as the sound chamber, or acoustic amplifier. In electric instruments, the body contributes no amplification to the sound at all. Instead, the amplification is produced by the amplifier, which attaches to the guitar by a removable cable.

      Some factors influence the string’s pitch:

       Fretting: You can also change the pitch by shortening the string or, more practically, shortening its effective vibrating length. That’s what you do when you fret (press a string to the fretboard at a certain location on the neck). You’re playing shorter versions of the same string. Fretting allows you to play any pitch — flat, sharp, or natural — in the guitar’s entire range. Check out Chapter 4 for more information about fretting.

       Mass: A string’s mass, or thickness, influences its pitch. The thicker the string, the lower the pitch. That’s why the low-pitched strings are thicker than the high-pitched ones.

       Tension: You can change a string’s pitch by varying the tension of the string. Higher tension produces