So what I'd like to start with now is a Jimmy Reed style of shuffle and this is one that everybody's heard and every one can relate to.
Now the thing that you want to do in a Jimmy Reed style shuffle is you're going to be playing in the key of E
but you're not actually going to be playing E major chords.
You're actually going to be playing what looks like an E minor chord and actually most guitar players would know this E minor chord
but in this case what you're going to do is put your index finger down in between the fifth and fourth strings there at the second fret.
Which is essentially where you would fret an E minor chord.
However, because of the angle of the hand at this and the fact that you're holding this finger down, pressing this down
the rest of the finger pretty much mutes the other strings on the guitar.
Particularly the third string which is where the third would be located which is the note that would make it an E minor.
So in this case it's not really E major and it's not really E minor it's actually what we call a fifth, it's almost like a power chord
and maybe it's the original power chord for all we know.
But in any case with this particular type of chording we can get this E, B, E note setup which sounds standard blues
without being strictly major, without being minor, without really even being dominant.
Ok, so what we're going to do right now is we're going to look at how we can accomplish this with our right hand also.
The right hand of course what you want to do is open your hand if you can instead of holding it and strumming like this.
Hold your hand a little closer down to the top of the guitar.
In other words, allow your hand to relax and that way you can regulate the amount of space that you have between your guitar and your pick,
that way you don't have to think so much about your hand floating around.
So as we get our hand close in we're going to be doing all down strokes.
Now the sound you're going to have is going to be continuous like this and if we do that with a chord we have this.
Now if you notice also I'm muting a little bit. Now it's not always necessary to do that.
Particularly if you're playing a Strat or a Tele or something like that, you might want that real bright sound
but with a lot of the Humbucker Pickups you're going to end up with a lot of bass end.
I mute a little bit to give it that rhythmic sound.
Now in terms of the left hand technique we're going to hold the index finger down here at the second fret
and what we're going to do is we're going to also fret at the fourth string with our ring finger
and we're going to fret at the fifth fret with our little finger.
In doing this we're going to be able to do two beats on each position so we're going to go:
One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two like that. So it sounds like this…
Now you may have noticed I did that four times and that because we're doing a twelve bar blues.
The first four bars are the one chord or the E chord and they will be the ones that,
that'll be the chord you want to play for four bars and then we're going to bring our index finger over to the next string.
In other words we're going to move it between the fourth and third string
and this functions much the same way as the E chord did except this will give us our A chord.
Now this is neither an A major nor an A minor.
Again, A, E, A are the notes and so it's just a fifth, it's a power chord in a sense
and in this case you're going to be strumming the fifth, fourth and third strings.
Just exactly the same way that we did when we were playing in E. Just like this.
We'll do that two times.
Ok, now for the B chord we're going to in the case of this song, we're going to come on up to the seventh fret
and we're going to make a barred seventh chord.
So what we're going to do is make a regular barred B chord here.
Take the little finger off here on the fourth string so that we end up with a seventh here.
So this is a B seventh chord and we will get a shuffling sound with our little finger, two frets above our ring finger on the fifth string like this.
Again, it's that same thing: One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two.
We'll do one measure of that.
One measure of the A.
Then we're going to hit the low E string and we're going to play a turnaround. Ok.