How to play fingerstyle acoustic blues

Fingerstyle blues playing is quite a unique sub genre of music, and although it shares many similarities with normal fingerstyle playing, and even normal blues playing, it is in fact very different and requires a slightly different skill set. The good news is I'm here to walk you through the essentials you need to play this style, as well as offer you a very cool acoustic blues piece to apply these concepts to. So, grab your favourite acoustic guitar and let's get started!

The Video

This blog post is designed to be supporting and extra material alongside this awesome YouTube video we've put together for you guys! So, I would highly recommend watching the video, then reading the blog post (or the other way round, whatever suits you now). We've also provided you with a very cool audio file and backing track outlining the basic changes, so you have something fun to play along with that will help keep you in time when you're learning this. You download those tracks here.

Some fundamentals…

In order to play in this style there are a few fundamental concepts we need to start getting good at, so just before we dive into the full piece, let's dive into the basics and build up a bit of a knowledge that will help us unpack the full delta style guitar piece.

one. Keep the bass note ringing.

Listening to the track at the start of the video, hopefully you can hear that it sounds a little like there are two guitars playing at the same time. You have the bass note identifying the root of the chord, and you have the lead and chordal part that it more typical of a blues guitar part. The cool thing is, as you'll notice, there is in fact only one guitar part, as I'm playing both these elements together. What we need to therefore start getting used to is the separation of our thumb from the fingers.

This process happens in two stages. Initially we need to work through the tab one beat at a time, to identify where the chords go, and where the bass notes go. One beat at a time is slowly followed by playing the whole bar. It's a slightly laborious process, but it's the only way to learn a piece like this (or at least that's my experience with it). After that, the second stage that gradually reveals itself is that you are playing the bar at a normal speed, and you start to hear the bass note as an individual part to the chord part. This is where you get to the point that the thumb starts to become separated from the rest of the chord and lead part. Then you know you're getting there with it!

two. Keep the foot tapping.

These bass notes are always falling on the main down beats. So if we were counting "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and" then the bass notes are always being played on the 1, 2, 3 & 4 beats. Therefore, they match up perfectly with our foot stomping to the floor. I would therefore highly recommend getting into a good practice with the thumb hit playing alongside a floor stomp. Something like this:

I will say, at this point, that this part can feel like you're trying to split your brain into a million parts! It's not easy, but as with anything that isn't easy, the only way through is to keep practicing and keep working at it. Start by simply playing the bass notes without the other bits of the tab and hooking up the floor stomp, then gradually work it into the track.

three. Chords and licks

The final point I want to highlight is that this track is based around a very simple chord progression. It's a standard 12 bar blues, but we are embellishing these chords a lot throughout the piece. Let's first just take a look at the chords the whole thing is based on, in the key of E blues:

Breaking that down, when we're on the E7 chord we're alternating between playing a simple e7 or E major chord, and using our E minor pentatonic to create some very cool licks. As we're using the open strings a lot, we're hanging around the pentatonic box 1 and 2, as shown here:

For the A7 chord, were alternating between a range of A major or A7 chords, the E minor pentatonic (as that works over the whole piece) and of course the A minor pentatonic box 4 and 5, as you can see here:

Finally, for the B7 we're simply playing a classic B7 chord, as I showed you above! As we then move into the turnaround we're using the classic chromatic idea of starting on the tonic note and descending chromatically downwards. If you're interested in learning ore about blues turnarounds, check this out.

The track

So, with all the essentials learnt it's time to properly dive into the track. I take you through it in detail in the video, and to support that, here is the full tab. I would highly recommend learning the piece one bar at a time. It will take a bit of time to get it together like this, but it will be so worth it! There's no rush after all 🙌😀