Blues Guitar Tips - How to Perform Left Hand Techniques

If you have a hankerin' to be a blues guitar player but don't know how to start, there is no better way than to immerse yourself in the recordings of the blues guitar players of the twentieth century. You can use the licks of famous blues guitarists as building blocks that will eventually be the fragments of your own blues guitar solos. There is wide agreement amongst blues fans about who are the greatest blues guitarists, who is the best to learn from, but once you get talking to people you will realize that each person's reaction to the works of the blues masters is personal and unique. So your starting point to being a blues guitar player is to take your own personal take on the blues you hear and expand on it.

If you are a new guitar player you might not be familiar with the various techniques that blues guitar players use to make their guitars sing. There is no special blues "magic" that you learn from the blues legends, the guitar techniques for one style are pretty much the same as for another, but you will find your own personal way of making established guitar techniques your own.

There's a whole world of communication in the techniques that guitar players use to play notes with the left hand instead of picking using the right hand. The techniques are called hammer-ons and pull-offs. A pull-off is the art of picking a note and taking your left hand finger away in a kind of pulling action so that the note below your original note sounds. For example, you could place you first finger on the first fret of the first string and the second finger on the second fret of the first string. With both fingers in place, you pick the first string sounding the F# note and pull your second finger away so that the F note at the first fret sounds.

The "opposite" to the pull-off is the hammer-on which, if you follow up on the pull-off you just executed, you "hammer" the second finger back to where it was at the second fret so that the F# note sounds again. Another technique for the guitar player's left hand is String Bending. If you look at your finger placed at a fret, you move the finger by pushing up and down. This makes your guitar string give a warbling sound.

As you are an aspiring blues guitarist of the twenty-first century, you will probably prefer to listen to electric guitar players. B. B. King is the coolest of the black blues guitarists, closely followed by a white English boy named Eric Clapton. You could also give a listen to Chuck Berry who is practically a one-man guitar style.