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

Henry Thomas (1874, Big Sandy, Texas -1930?) was an American blues singer, songwriter and musician. After leaving home in his teens he drifted along the Texas rail lines as a hobo before earning his way as an itinerant songster.

Contradiction Blues is a short fingerstyle blues piece I wrote. I called it 'Contradiction Blues' because of the contradiction between the mellow, laid back section at the start and the more punchy and bluesy second part of the tune. The piece is written for a guitar tuned to Open D and predominantely uses a travis picking pattern with a regular alternating bass line. 

On this site I will post a number of tabs of various blues tunes. I will post them not only in pdf format but also in power tab format. Power Tab is a tab editor package which was created many years ago by Brad Larsen. Although the software is quite old and no longer updated I still find it to be one of the best tab editors out there for the type of music I play and write.

One of the most commonly used alternate tunings is that of Open D. The tuning is used across many different styles of guitar music but most commonly it is used in blues and folk music. How to tune to Open D Open D tuning tunes the strings of the guitar so that when all the strings are played open it forms a D Major chord. The D Major chord is formed from the three notes which make up the D Major triad, these are the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of the D Major scale, which are D, F# and A respectively. Thus, each of the guitar strings in open D tuning will be tuned to one of these three notes.