A lot of people that try to learn how to play blues guitar often get frazzled with the sheer number of blues guitar lessons that are available online. Often times, guitarists will try and learn from watching guitar video lessons, however these can be quite confusing.

This is due to the fact that there is not much specific instruction in these videos. More often than not, these videos only show examples for you to try and imitate. In reality, every great guitarist knows that in order to play the blues properly, you have to have a solid foundation of technique in place to build from.

In order to try and better explain blues guitar playing, we have put together the following tutorial of some great techniques that are essential to playing the blues.

For those of you, who don't know, allow me to give you a brief history of the blues. This will better help you to understand the emotion and evolution of the music, this is essential to understanding blues techniques.

There is not one style of the blues, in fact there are many different variations. Quite often these styles were invented by many musicians that all contributed to the music scene in their city or state. This is why the different styles of the blues are often referred to as Texas Blues, Delta Blues, or Mississippi Blues.

The musicians in each music scene would take the local music and change the instrumentation or change the chords and chord progressions. They also added unconventional notes and scales to make the music one of a kind. This is important to note when learning to play blues guitar, due to the fact that each of these styles puts its own variation on the blues.

This means that blues guitar lessons are usually specific to one style of the blues. This is also the main thing when choosing online guitar video lessons that are right for you.

One of the most important things when learning how to play blues guitar, and especially the blues, is your picking technique. Before you go ahead and start to learn the scales that are essential to playing the blues, you need to first build your picking technique in order to play these scales properly. The technique that is used by almost all professional guitarists is commonly referred to as the rhythm picking technique; however this may be called something different depending on where you reside. The basic motion of this picking technique is up and down, meaning that you never will strum or pick, up or down twice in a row.

This means for every note you play you will alternate your picking motion up and down. For example if there is a basic riff with the notes A,C,D,A,E one after another, the A would be played with a downwards picking motion while the C would be played directly after the A with an upward motion.

This is absolutely essential to playing scales that are a must when learning how to play guitar. This is the first thing you should learn when taking guitar video lessons to get a solid guitar technique. If you look closely all good players will be using this technique and it should be taught before learning any other blues guitar lessons.

This allows you to play two notes with one motion. Instead of picking the A with a downwards motion and then having to reset your hand to do the same motion for the C, you just pick the C when your hands on its way back from the downward motion of picking the A. This will add the fluid rhythm that blues players are known for to your style.