The Blues Guitar

In this post I will look at the classic tune Vestapol. Vestapol is a country blues parlour tune played in the open D tuning . There are many variations of this tune and the one I will show you is a fairly short and basic version. Below is a video of me playing it, links to the tab, and some general playing advice.

What fingers do you use when fingerpicking on a guitar? If you are playing a standard 6 string guitar you have 6 strings to pick and 5 fingers on your picking hand, so what is the best or most efficient way to use those fingers to pick those strings? The answer to this varies depending on the type of music you are playing and your own personal playing preference. However, there are some fairly standard picking techniques which are used. To help us along it is probably easier to number the strings from 1 to 6, with 1 being the highest pitched string and 6 being the lowest. i.e string 6 lying closest to the guitar player and string 1 furthest away. This is common in most guitar tunings.

Blues music often has a distinctive feel to the rhythm. Listen to the famous piece 'Dust my Broom' by Elmore James and you can hear the bouncy, offset rhythm played by Elmore permeating the whole song. This rhythmic style predominates in most blues music and is also used in many other musical styles. So what causes the music to sound this way and how do you play it? Getting the feel for the triplets In musical notation you will usually see this symbol at the start of a piece of blues music:  Image from musescore.org