Building Your Blues Chops

A lot of people who’ve enjoyed my Blues for Beginners video on YouTube, have reached out to me and said something like, “I’m having so much fun with the ideas in this video. I’m jamming along with jam tracks and making up my own solos, but I’m hungry for more!”

Ask and ye shall receive! In this lesson harmonica wizard Alex Paclin teaches some really solid blues riffs that will bulk up your blues chops…

6 Simple Blues Harmonica Riffs – That You Can Play Today!

One of the things that’s awesome about this video is that the riffs start really easy and get progressively harder.

The way I recommend approaching a resource like this is to milk it for all it’s worth. Take the 1st riff, ‘Spoonful’ and play it for a week. See all the different ways you can make the riff sing while:

•   playing it alone
•	adding hand wah
•	bending deep vs shallow
•	playing it as soft as you can
•	playing it as loud as sounds good
•	using throat vibrato and/or tremolo
•	playing along with the original recording
•	whatever else you can think of experimenting with!

Once you’ve played this riff, played with this riff, and really internalized it , then go back to the lesson and learn the second riff…

Rinse and repeat.

That’s a great way to build up your blues chops.

6 Likes

Thank you Luke, much appreciated . . . :+1:

2 Likes

These are great ideas, Luke. Thank you so much!!
Becky

2 Likes

Thanks that’s real good tunes to play along with keep on keeping on

2 Likes