Learning to make up your own riff is great fun and will also help you when it comes to transcribing. In the real world it’s very free - you don’t have to stick with the note groups and arpeggios shown, these are shown just as a starting point but you’ll learn a lot by exploring, trying other notes, rhythms or concepts.

Be sure to check out the way the riffs move with the chords, ‘cos that is really the key to making this work!

Experiment with notes from the Minor Pentatonic, The A7 Arpeggio and or the A6 arpeggio! The only limit is your imagination!

A big help will be to listen and try and work out some riffs by the great masters... Hubert Sumlin (who played with Howlin Wolf) did amazing stuff, but best to pick some players that you really dig... best to start simple, if they sounds a little like the things we looked at in this lesson they should be an easy place to start!

Video Lesson

Backing Track

Here is the Blues in A Backing track for you to practice with! This one uses a "Long V" and a "Long I", keeping it simple and giving you time to think about your turnaround.

Blues Rhythm Track 10 by justinguitar

You can download the 13 track set of mp3's for this series for £5 (approx $8) (Blues Rhythm Guitar Mp3) - they are also included on the Blues Rhythm Guitar DVD for £15 (approx $25) of this series which comes 3 bonus lessons (44 minutes worth!) and a pdf booklet.

Chart

 

 

 

HELP!!!!

If you need to ask a question about this lesson - there is a topic set up specifically to help you with this lesson. To help you find it easily you can click the following link and it will take you right the topic. You'll be able to see questions that other people had and ask your own questions! Hopefully one of the very helpful members of our community will be there to help you soon, I do go there and answer stuff too - but there are just too many questions for me to answer alone! So click this link to get help with this lesson!