Teaching the Blues

Teaching the Blues

Learning to play the blues is essential in the guitar classroom.  Kids love playing it.  It's easy to learn, doesn't require reading skill and easily leads right into improvisation. I have found that often kids who have trouble with note-reading, such as special education students, can have success in playing a blues shuffle and especially with the corresponding improvisation lessons.

Also, it's a great way to get everyone performing together again when you reach the point in the school year where kids are at different levels. With the shuffle and the improvisation component, there are ample opportunities for remediation and enrichment while still playing together as a class on the same piece. You can pretty quickly get three groups playing, with one on a shuffle pattern, another playing a chord accompaniment and the last group playing simple patterns which will make up the “vocabulary” for later improvisation.

Finally, it can’t be overemphasized that the blues offers perhaps the best answer to the question of what to do to keep students engaged for 50 minutes (or longer). With its simple structure, abundance of recognizable song examples and endless variation, the blues offers a fun alternative class activity. It can be used as a laid back end-of-class activity and even as a reward to encourage students to work harder on other daily studies.

Basic shuffle Pattern

It is common practice to teach young guitarists the blues shuffle in A. The reason for this is that the shuffle patterns based on the I, IV and V chords can all be played in open position and using the same fingering. Also, a basic moveable minor pentatonic scale is easily played in A at the 5th fret. For the I Chord, which I call “the A spot”, I teach them the pattern below by rote.

Then, the two other positions, the “D and E spots”:

 

Teaching the Structure

There are many variations of the 12-bar blues, but at the beginning, I usually go with one which is structurally very simple. The following is my beginner blues structure with each chord symbol representing one bar or measure:

A A A A

D D A A

E E A A

If you are a musician, this sounds a little simple, but most students aren’t as familiar as you are with the blues, and this structure is simple enough to be immediately memorized. I usually just write on the board like this:

A 4x
D 2x
A 2x
E 2x
A 2x

I strongly urge you to resist the temptation to notate all of this for students, especially if they’re younger than high school age. It’s the blues, after all. Besides, it takes the focus off of the overall structure and encourages a note-to-note perspective which may be distracting for beginners. Later, it may be helpful to have some notation or tablature when introducing variations of the shuffle.

When students are comfortable with the basic version, I introduce this common variation:

A A A A
D D A A

E D A A

There are many more variations especially when you include turnarounds. It’s probably most effective to teach them in the context of songs which have a 12-bar blues structure.

In my next post I’ll discuss memorizing the structure, variations and including chords.