Blues headlines

Richard Barrett is on a mission to make you a better blues player – with full audio examples and backing tracks

AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT of playing music is being aware of “where” you’re playing in the beat and how it relates to the groove being laid down by the rhythm section. This concept can be broken up into th

A BIG PART of blues is playing over a “shuffle” groove — a triplet-driven swing-eighths feel with a backbeat (accents on beats 2 and 4) — at various tempos. There are many great shuffle-based tunes. A

Amid the mayhem of his European tour, Joe takes time out to give us a guided tour around his 2025 live gear, delivers the lowdown on some of his more storied guitars, and tells us why his mighty multi-amp rig has to run at breaking point in order to make the earth move and those riffs resonate…

THIS MONTH, I’D like to talk about the paramount importance of the right, or pick, hand — how it’s the keeper of time and the thing that gives us the groove while we play. I’ll demonstrate some exampl

IN MY PREVIOUS “Blues You Can Use” columns, I focused on what I consider to be essential rhythm guitar and accompanying single-note patterns that exemplify Chicago-style blues guitar, as heard in the