Learn The Blues Guitar Techniques That Make Your Rhythm Riffs Sound More Complex
It’s quite common in blues guitar to play ‘easy’ riffs. Because we call these riffs ‘easy’, it’s also easy to fall into the trap of playing these riffs in the same boring way all the time. If we listen to great blues guitarists they always find a way to add some sort of maturity and expression to even the simplest riffs. If you really want to make your blues riffs sound great, you have to be able to turn even the easiest riff around and add a touch of complexity to it.
One way to make your blues guitar riffs sound better can be done by adding expression techniques such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, etc. This will add expressiveness to your blues riffs. In this way you can make any simple riff sound complex.
To illustrate this we’ll start with a basic bluesrock riff.
Listen to this riff
As you can hear and see, there’s nothing really advanced to this riff (expect for the syncopated rhythm in the first bar). Now let’s add some techniques to the single note riff in the second bar.
Adding a Slide
In the above example we’ve added a slide on the second and sixth note in the second bar.
Listen to this riff
Adding Hammer-ons & Pull-offs
In order to make your riffs sound more fluent we can add hammer-ons and pull-offs, just as in the tablature below.
Listen to this riff
Adding Vibrato
One last technique that we’ll look into here is vibrato technique, which we’ll add to the last note of the riff.
Listen to this riff
Combining Various Techniques
In this last example we’re combining all these techniques into one riff. We’re using a slide, a hammer-on and pull-off and add vibrato to the last note.
Listen to this riff
As you can see these techniques can make your riffs ‘come to life’ and sound more mature and professional. There are many other techniques that we can use, but for now we’ll only focus on these.
How to practice?
There are several practice strategies that we can look into, some of which that will not only help you to apply expression techniques to your riffs, but will also help you with creativity. So let’s first focus on the next exercises.
- Exercise 1: First simply practice the riffs in the above tablature examples.
- Exercise 2: Now, let’s try to reform the basic riff that we played in the first example above. We didn’t add any techniques to this basic riff, so now it’s your turn to experiment with these techniques. Apply them wherever you feel like they would fit the riff. Sometimes this will result in a success and other times you will conclude that the riff could be improved on. This is normal and is a natural part of the learning process. By focusing on this exercise you will be able to build your own great sounding riffs, so it’s important to stick with this exercise, even thought in the beginning your attempts may not be so successful.
Building your own riffs can be done using an experimental approach (which is the approach we’re more or less using in this exercise), but this is not the only way to do it (and in my opinion it’s also not the best way, since it’s subject to trail and error).
There’s also a more analytical and logical approach in which you can build riffs, which gives you the tools to come up with ideas faster and more fluently. That said, before we’ll look into guided practice exercises, some form of experimentation like we’re doing in this exercise is also important.
- Exercise 3: Build your own riffs
Let’s start from the basic blues riff and build bar two from the ground up again. To do this, we have to be sure which scales we can use. Almost all blues riffs are build from existing scales. We’re using the A5 chord (although above the tablature it reads ‘A7’, to express the tonality of the A7 blues chord that would be the most common option to play here, besides the A5 chord) in bar 1 and the A minor pentatonic scale in bar 2.
This is the scale, which include the notes that we are using in the basic riff:
Am pentatonic scale (position 4)
Now, try to reform the basic riff by playing a different riff in bar two. You can take any of the notes from the scale above to do this.
There are many ways in which we can build unique riffs. You will get better at improvising rhythm parts as your rhythmic awareness deepens and other guitar skills like technique improves, but by focusing on these creativity exercises your guitar playing will improve on many different levels.
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