Going from zero to blues guitar hero isn’t as hard as you think! At first the task may seem impossible, the trick is learning to take small steps; that is the key, once you see the power of learning in small and simple steps you will have discovered one of the most important secrets of the professional guitarist.
Here we go with the baby step concept!
I’m going to show you how to play “Before You Accuse Me” from Eric Clapton’s “unplugged” album; it’s a great album to play as most of the instruments are acoustic and there isn’t a lot of heavy studio production so the instruments sound quite natural.
Essentially, music is “pitch in time”; if we delved into this thing called music, we would also discover that music has “form and content”.
Now is the time to apply these fundamental principles to learning and remembering the blues.
Step 1: Learn the song form: There are various musical formats or structures for the blues, for example, the 8, 12, 16, and 24 bar blues are the most popular blues song forms; the 12-bar version is by far the most widely used blues template.
Our first decision is to identify the correct ‘song form’ for “Before You Accuse Me”.
Before You Accuse Me is a 12-bar blues song form.
Let’s prepare the bars for our song; The key to remembering songs is to present your song in a “four bars per line” template.
|//// | //// | //// | //// |
|//// | //// | //// | //// |
|//// | //// | //// | //// |
Visually, the ‘four bars per line’ format makes it easy to spot similarities in the chord progression; however many times songs have identical chord progressions, due to various printing considerations in printed music books it is extremely difficult to identify recurring patterns; sometimes there will be three bars to a line, the next line may be five bars, and so on.
Step 2: Identify the content of the song. Most 12 bar blues fit nicely into one of the four blues ‘content’ templates.
“Before You Accuse Me” is no exception, here is the ‘form’ of the 12 bar blues song presented with its correct musical ‘content’.
Before you accuse me
|E7 /// | A7 /// | E7 /// | E7 /// |
|A7 /// |A7 /// | E7 /// | E7 /// |
|B7 /// |A7 /// | E7 /// | E7 /// |
And there we have our song ready to play along with Eric Clapton!
I introduced the song in the exact same key as the recorded version and even though the song will play for 3-4 minutes, it’s just this same simple progression played over and over again; even while soloing; just focus on playing the foot and keep track of where you are in the chord
sequence.
The trick to playing along with the recorded version is to remember that the chord progression we just learned begins when the vocals begin.
Your first strum will coincide with the letter “Be-Forward you accuse me” etc…
Strum your first chord “E7” on – “fore”; (To be)- Forward you accuse me etc.
By the way: if you have Eric Clapton’s “Unplugged” album, there’s another song on that album that uses the exact progression… try playing along with track 12 “Malted Milk” and you’ve already learned how to play two songs. ; Baby steps really work!
