Beginner Guitar Lesson 24 - Decorating the Blues

Now that you have a few new techniques and chords under your belts and your chord changes are pretty sharp, we can begin to embellish your blues progression.

After you've gotten confident with changing between techniques, you can then practice up to tempo with our custom background track so you can get the feel of playing with a real band.

We're going to look at articulating between strumming and finger picking this time, so this time you can put your plectrum aside.

Let's listen to the mp3 example provided.

You can hear that our guitarist is strumming the chords using the 7th and octave rhythm idea and using hammer ons, and the shortlick from Lesson 03 as well as the Blues turnaround. He is also kicking the chords on the up beat in some places to keep the rhythmic motion moving forward.

These components all make the difference between a professional sounding performance and an amateur performance.