Improvising Blues Guitar

Learning to improvise blues guitar is quite easy to get started but not necessarily easy to master. Advanced guitar playing always comes with experience and takes time but if you are just starting out, and blues guitar is your thing, then you can get stuck straight in by grabbing a bunch of jam tracks and simply playing about with the minor pentatonic and blues scale.

Jam tracks are your best friends here. The thing with jam tracks is you must make sure you are using high quality ones. While free jam tracks can be okay, most of them are so uninspiring that they don't help you much. There are a few places to get high quality blues jam tracks to practice your improvisation over. The ones over at Blues jam session are very high quality, I highly recommend that you use jam tracks of this calibre.

Also, another way to get high quality blues jam tracks is to check out some of the monthly guitar magazines. When they are running a section on blues guitar, the examples will normally be accompanied by high quality backing tracks on the CD that comes with the magazine. If you buy these magazines regularly then over time you will build a library of quality practice material. It will take you a while to build up the amount you get with Blues jam session but if you have plenty of back issues then you might have enough to get started.

Other than high quality jam tracks you will also need to learn as many licks and solos as you can. This is the best way to learn blues guitar. The more the merrier. Variety is the quickest way to learn because it forces you to see how everything fits together. Inspiration also comes from variety; each different jam track or lick that you learn will inspire certain moods that just make you want to practice more. The more you enjoy it, the better. It's hard to really get stuck into something when your choices are limited.

We'll have some more articles later about things you can do with the pentatonic scales over blues but either way, be on the lookout for as many jam tracks and licks as you can find and learn.