Blues headlines

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

DURING THE LAST week of November 1963, the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was released in the United Kingdom. That same week, a young Brit named Laurence Juber started playing guitar. It wouldn’t

AN ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL element in blues guitar is the turnaround. It is a basic function of blues music that the turnaround happens at the end of the progression and flips it over back to the beginni

Two albums recorded 50 years apart – the gear might have stayed the same, but the recording experience is completely different

LAST MONTH, I talked about how I devised the primary riffs in the title track to my 2023 album Hard Wired, which is played in drop D tuning (low to high: D, A, D, G, B, E). I’d now like to share some

WHEN I AM composing and arranging music, I like to think as an orchestrator. As the guitarist, I try to represent just about everything that’s in the arrangement — the drum syncopations, horn parts, k