Tighten Up Your Blues: #1 Tweaking the 3rd

Tighten Up Your Blues is a weekly video guitar lesson series by longtime TrueFire educator Jeff McErlain. In this series, Jeff will focus on nuance and all the finer points of touch, feel, and inflection in blues guitar playing. Be sure to subscribe!

Video Guitar Lesson

Nuance is everything when it comes to music, it is what separates the good from the great. It is easy to overlook it when learning an instrument because we are so involved in the technical aspect of running scales, learning licks, etc. When you really sit down and listen to a great musician, you will certainly hear great technique, but what makes that person sound like that person is the finer points of touch, feel, and inflection. The nuance.

The blues is all about nuance and one of the most important elements is the way we can work the flat 3rd of the blues scale. There are so many masters of this, all the familiar names, BB King, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Hendrix, Albert King, Muddy Waters, etc. Any blues musician worth his salt has spent a lot of time working on this whether they know it or not. I don’t think Muddy sat down and thought about the relationship between a flat 3rd on a Dom7 chord, but he certainly heard it, of that I am 100% sure. For us mere mortals, we may have to work on it. Once I became aware of tweaking that 3rd and worked on the nuance of it, I sounded better. WAY better. So check it out, I still work on it and am in love with the sound.

Tighten Up Your Blues is a weekly video guitar lesson series by longtime TrueFire educator Jeff McErlain. In this series, Jeff will focus on nuance and all the finer points of touch, feel, and inflection in blues guitar playing. Be sure to subscribe!