Blues Guitar Riffs are incredibly fun, especially if you can play along with other guitar players or a band. A good thing about blues riffs is that you don’t necessarily have to play super fast – it’s about that soulful feeling and sound and most importantly the timing.

Be sure to play your blues guitar riffs with the timing of the melody or song. Take your time and be patient with yourself. I’ve found that it takes about 100 times at first playing a riff to get the muscle memory to sink in and then you can start working on that gorgeous soulful sound with feeling and even customize it to your own style.

“What? 100 times!” you might say to yourself … don’t worry – here’s an easy way to think about it … if you play a riff 5 times in the morning (only a few minutes) and 5 times before you go to bed, you’ll have the riff down solid in only two weeks. You can start another riff after one week and overlap (it would be twice the blues guitar practice time, but you’d get twice the results). If you do one riff a week, that’s 52 incredible blues guitar riffs in only a year!

Let’s get started. A lot of blues musicians are visual – we read music or tablature, right? (well, except the famous blind blues guitarists). Here’s a great visual representation of the 12 Bar Blues:

I       IV      I      I
IV    IV      I      I
V      IV      I      I

These are all roman numerals – if you’re not familiar with roman numerals, I =1, IV = 4, V = 5. So if you are doing a song in the Key of C, the note C would be I. Then you count up the notes – D = 2, E = 3, F = IV, G = V, A = 6, B = 7, and back to C = 1. In the key of C, your notes would be C, F and G.

Exercise: If you were in the key of E, what would your notes be?

Memorization Tip: Check out the visual representation of the 12 bar blues above … note the first chord goes up incrementally – I, IV, V – easy huh?   Then, look at the last three notes in each line – IV, I, I … the same in every line.  I love this blues guitar memory tip – you will be able to memorize the 12 bar blues by the end of this sentence.  Now that’s a quick method for learning blues guitar.

Extra Bonus Tip: For a nice turnaround, replace the last row of notes

V    IV    I    I   with two whole measures and two half measures of the following chords:

V     IV     I/IV    I/IV –>  (This extra bonus tip is dedicated to my friend and mentor – awesome life and business coach Will Mattox who’s learning blues guitar at the young age of 62)

 

Here’s a version of 12 bar blues guitar riff in blues guitar tabs format:

12 bar blues guitar riff

Exercise: When you play it, see if you can figure out what’s different in this version vs. the diagram above.

Here’s a video showing how to learn blues guitar riffs with the pentatonic scale: