Watch the demonstration video and pay special attention to the “thump” of the bass line, as well as the inflections used on the melody. The thumb should drive this tune, but be careful that it doesn’t overpower the fingerpicking. 3 is an E blues I’ve written in the style of Lightnin’ Hopkins. This is a common monotone bass note choice for this chord, especially when D7 functions as the IV chord in an A blues progression.įig. 2, the 3rd (F#) of D7 is used as the bass note and is played with the thumb. The chord root is not your only choice for bass notes. Playing this with a slight palm mute and a little bit of attitude goes a long way towards achieving the rhythmic drive found in this style of blues. In this example, the bass line consists of quarter-notes. 1, the chord we’re dealing with is E and the root is-you guessed it-an E.

The monotone bass line is a static line that’s typically created by playing a chord tone from a given chord in the song’s progression. Lightnin’ Hopkins – “Baby Please Don’t Go”

Take a moment to watch Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins’ perform “Baby Please Don’t Go,” Delta blues master Son House perform “Preachin’ the Blues,” and finally Chicago blues great Big Bill Broonzy play “Hey Hey.” Pay special attention to their right-hand technique-specifically their thumbs-and you’ll see each of them employing a monotone bass line. There’s no better instruction than listening to recordings or viewing video, if available, of the blues greats we are trying to learn from. Today we’ll look at three types of bass lines that help define the sound of the aforementioned sub-styles of fingerstyle blues: monotone bass, alternating bass, and boogie-woogie bass. The bass player, our thumb, crafts lines in a few distinct ways. In solo fingerstyle guitar, the thumb typically takes the role of the bass player. Instead of trying to learn each sub-style from a theoretical or historical perspective, I’ve decided to approach learning it from a guitar technique perspective, specifically focusing on the picking-hand thumb. This list is by no means exhaustive, but these are the styles we’ll cover in this lesson. Obviously there’s a large body of music that falls into this category, which can be further broken down into such sub-styles as Delta blues, Texas blues, ragtime, Piedmont, and boogie-woogie. Okay folks, time to put down that pick because today we’re focusing on acoustic fingerstyle blues.

Learn monotone bass, alternating bass, and boogie-woogie techniques.Ĭlick here to download the accompanying mp3 audio examples and a printable PDF of the notation.

Dive into Delta blues, Texas blues, ragtime, Piedmont, and boogie-woogie styles.

Chops: Intermediate Theory: Intermediate Lesson Overview:

Acoustic blues fingerstyle pdf