Genre Studies – Learn Guitar Club

Walking Bass Blues Guitar Lesson

Adding a a walking bass line to your blues chord progressions means that you’ll be alternating the bass note of the chord you are playing. Watch the lesson to get a better picture of this technique, after which you should be able to apply it to your own 12 bar blues chord progressions as well.

Here are a couple of tips for using bass walks in blues:

Usually, for a bass note on the first beat, you want to use the root of the chord,
A common way to reach the next chord is ascending chromatically
Use the third and flattened 7 of a chord to play harmony on the higher strings, it’s like 2 guitarists playing at the same time,
Using muting on the offbeats adds a percussive feel. A nice rhythm would be the following, when using triplets:

           1       2       3
Harmony	   -	 Play	 Chuck
Bass	  Play	   -	   -

Power Chord Rhythms AC/DC Style

With an electric guitar, it often sounds best to play 2-3 note chords. This is where power chords prove useful. Power chords are usually found in metal, rock, and blues. Since they’re rather tiny chords, they’re not widely used in traditional acoustic strumming scenarios.

The video lesson will show you several power chord rock rhythm patterns you can play using only power chords. This lesson is important for anyone learning rock or metal, since power chords are used a lot by super bands such as AC/DC, Led Zepelin, and basically all bands that have an electric guitarist.

The power chords we’re going to study are movable chords, which means that we are able to move the actual power chord shape up or down the neck of the guitar, to create different power chords. Many guitarists prefer to use all downstrokes when strumming power chords. This results in a more “chunky” sound. Muting the open strings is a very important part of playing power chords as well.