29 Jun 09 Use Blues Backing Tracks To Improve Your Musical Performance

By Tom Simpson

Are you struggling to make your name in the Blues?

Did the audience throw tomatoes at you because your blues guitar solo performance sucked? If you want to impress the crowd with your tunes, you have to have a decent set of blues licks to break the tension and to keep the jam going. This is not a blues guitar lesson. This is a blues guitar philosophy that you have to imbibe, so that you can seriously call yourself a great performer.

Any blues guitar lesson will tell you about the importance of having a selection of licks in your repertoire because these are notes that you’ll need to play to your audience. A great guitar solo is actually a mix-and-match collection of blues licks. So before you can attempt to be a performer, you’ll need to brush up on those licks. In order to do that, you need to download those backing tracks and listen to them carefully. After a while, you should start practicing them on your own. Play it by the ear and see what fits, what sounds good. When you’ve done that, you have pretty much mastered the technique of combining blues licks. You can now start building up your own solo.

Then begin to learn from yourself! Any decent lead blues guitar knows how to tell a story with his playing. A lick is actually like a musical sentence with every note acting like a word. If the combination of words in a sentence has to make sense and follow certain syntax, the same thing goes for musical notes. But like words, any blues licks can be mixed and matched to others but it has to make coherent musical sense. Think about it this way, since you’re just beginning, you don’t think about creating your own technique just yet. Focus on the ability of getting your audience to understand what you want to tell them through your music.

Learn by yourself. If you don’t want to shoulder the huge expense of having to enrol in a music school to get blues guitar lessons, you just need to be satisfied with learning by yourself. But don’t worry. This is one of the best ways to start learning the blues guitar style of playing. Alone you can play with emotion and that’s an advantage.

Every blues song is full of soul because each performance tells a different story. You probably sucked on stage the last time you performed because your crowd wasn’t able to get the story that you want to tell them through your music. Or even worse, you didn’t even have a story to tell now that is just sad! So what you do is study those blues licks I told you to download. Every lick is like a sentence in a story with the combination of notes making some sort of musical sense. So what you’re supposed to do is to combine those blues licks to form a coherent story and you’ve just made an excellent guitar solo piece!

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