How To Play Blues Guitar Riffs Anywhere On The Neck Of The Guitar
A lot of guitarists can play a decent guitar solo using the whole neck of the guitar, but when playing rhythm riffs they will stay playing in one position only.
When you first learn blues rhythm riffs, it’s normal to stay in one position all of the time. In the early stages of your guitar playing this is just fine, but after time your rhythm guitar playing should stay on developing, so you can play riffs all over the neck of the guitar. Just as you would do when you play advanced guitar solos.
Let me show you how to ‘mirror’ riffs to other positions on the guitar neck. In the tab below you’ll find a basic bluesrock riff in the key of A. Let’s call this ‘Riff A’.
Riff A
Now let’s ‘mirror’ this riff to the minor pentatonic scale in box position.
Riff B
Note that in Riff B we’re playing the same notes as in the original riff A, just higher on the neck of the guitar. In this example we’re using the A-string as a pedal tone to create a drone-effect by adding this string under each note.
This is how Riff B would look and sound like without this pedal tone:
Riff B’
As you can hear, this riff has less ‘body’ then the riff with the added A-string as pedal tone.
‘Mirroring’ Riffs To The Minor Pentatonic Scale
You should be able to transpose these riffs to fit over the other chords of a twelve bar blues progression yourself. The process is simple; just find the notes that you are playing in the original riff higher on the neck and play them there. You’ll get bonus points for playing double stops (two adjacent strings played together), since these doublestops will add some weight to the riff and in many case will make the riff sound more mature.
Playing Rhythm Guitar With Two Guitarists
Many intermediate guitarists will just double parts all of the time. This will start to sound boring after a while and isn’t all that creative. There are times when we need to play the same part in the same way with two guitars; for instance if we want to create a ‘huge’ sound. But fact is that you’ll also want to be able to be creative with riffs, so that you don’t need to play the same thing as the other guitarist. It’s simply great to have options.
This mirroring approach gives you a way to play the same part, but in a different way and it will sound totally cool.
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