How to Play a Blues Riff Pattern on Guitar

Video Transcript

"I'm Rick Tobey on behalf of Expert Village and this is Blues Progressions Part 2. Now in this section, we're going to kind of take the A blues progression a step further. And, rather than playing chords, we're going to play a riff, but we're going to do it in a rhythmic way so that you can actually use this riff as a substitute for the bar chords. And the riff goes like this. So now the way we play that is very easy. You're primarily just using your three fingers, the index finger, second finger and third finger. Starting out with the index finger on the E string on the fifth fret. You hit it twice with that kind of bouncy shuffle beat. Then you're going to have your third finger on the seventh fret of the D string. So you're kind of in position, it's not actually on the string but you're ready to go there. So after you hit the, with the third finger on the seventh fret then you come down with the index finger down to the fifth fret on the D string. We're actually not even using the second finger in this. We're only using two fingers. So that would go like this. And now you take the third finger and go down to the seventh fret on the A string. So it's basically two bouncy kind of hits each time we play the notes. This is a very, very useful riff. You can use this in a lot of blues songs."