Blues Guitar Riffs Tutorial

learn how to become master blues guitar

Though blues guitarists are more renowned for their guitar licks and solos than for riffs, good blues guitar players aren’t just able to touch your heart with sweet melodies.

They’re also able to be the engine of the songs with blues guitar riffs.

In this lesson we’ll explore the rhythm in the blues with guitar riffs that start from the very easy, and get pretty complex by the end.

With each guitar riff tab there will be a short explanation of the musical elements and techniques being used.

Use this knowledge to create your own basic blues guitar riffs even if you’re not an advanced guitar player yet.

For instance, if you can only play up to the third or fourth riff, you can still create simple blues riffs of your own. You will just have fewer options and your riffs will be simple, but you would have started training yourself to create music, as well as putting the techniques you know into practice.

Before we dig into the 10 easy blues guitar riffs, let’s get clear on some terminology that’s used when playing the blues.

Blues shuffle

The blues shuffle is a rhythmic pattern where instead of dividing the quarter note (crotchet) beat into two eight notes (quavers), it’s divided into a triplet where the first note is a quarter note and the second an eight note.

Though this rhythmic pattern is used in other genres of music, in the blues it is so common that many songs have an instruction at the top to indicate that all the beats should be divided this way (as you’ll see in the app).

There are variations to this rhythm. In fact, blues guitar can never be tabbed perfectly since each player has his own nuances of playing the same thing.

These minor differences include holding the first note of each beat of the shuffle for a little longer, or a little shorter, than a quarter note, playing one or both notes as staccato, or putting a rest between the two notes.

For the purposes of this lesson we’ll stick to the example given above, however, keep in mind that in real-life situations, guitar tabs are rarely completely faithful to what blues guitarists play.

don't forget to tune your guitar first with a tuner before using the Guitar Blues Riffs App.:)