Example 1: "When the Levy Breaks"

- All right, in this chapter, I'm going to talk about the slow blues. Let's have a listen to example number one. (metronome clicks) (drum and guitar music) One, two, three, four, one. (guitar music) All right, let's go ahead and break this one down.

This is basically sliding a chord riff down a whole step. So the chord that we're going to start with is an A6 chord. Since we're in the key of A. So I'm going to play the A6 here, on strings four, three, and two. At frets seven, six, and seven, respectively. I'm going to play those three notes, and slide that whole contraption down a whole step.

Now, when you slide, it's really, you really want to keep your fingers tightly together here, it's real easy for your fingers to spread apart and fall apart during the downward slide. Keeping it nice and tight. Slide the whole thing down a whole step. Now, it comes in on beat two. So on beat one there's nothing, on beat two, you do the slide. Two, three, four, one. (guitar music) And just let it ring.

And for every measure you do the same thing, but now when it changes to the D chord, we'll do the one-finger humdinger. And that'll be over here from the seventh fret, slide down to the fifth fret. (guitar music) That's actually a fragment of a partial D9 chord. Then for the E chord, slide down again. From the ninth fret to the seventh fret. Now we get to the turnaround, which is the last two bars of the blues in this case. I'm going to play single notes.

(guitar music) And these are on strings four and two. You're going to start at the fifth fret of both strings, play four, two, four, strings that is, chromatically down. (guitar music) To the second fret, and then, (guitar music) E, ah D to E on string four.

Which winds us up at the five chord or the E. At the end I ended on a A9 chord, here in the fourth position. (guitar music)