Guitar – Improvers

This musical building block transcends it’s origins in blues, as I’ve said you will often hear it in rock and many other genres too from pop to flamenco.

Learning to Improvise

Understanding chord progression is an essential skill for a musician. To be able to improvise, jam in a band or simply play along with the radio, you will need to have some understanding of chord progression, and one of the most basic and most widely used progressions is the 12 bar blues.

BB King, Jimi Hendrix the rolling Stones and a list of the greats as long as your arm all used the 12 bar blues and if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for us mortals.

Playing the 3 Chord Trick

And the good news is it’s easy, 3 chords are all you need and you’ve got the Blues. Throw in a capo and with those 3 chords you’ll be able to play in any key, (more on the capo another day).

Nate makes it even easier in this lesson by using power chords (strumming 2 strings at a time).

Have a look and see what you think.

Nate offers some great free tutorials at Guitarlessons.com but to get the full package you have to pay for the upgrade and unfortunately this includes the jam track he talks about.

Time to Jam

Congratulations you are now improvising.

It’s simply a matter of playing with whatever works for you. That’s the beauty of music, there is no right and wrong.

I hope you enjoyed the video’s and have learnt something from them. I truly believe this is one of the most important lessons you will have, as you take you’re first steps to improvisation and creating your own music.

To learn more or for more comprehensive blues lessons have a look at . If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.

Many thanks

And