Creating Your Own Blues!
One way of getting around this is to completely revamp a song and make it your own (or partly your own). It’s incredibly hard to write your own material, so adapting someone else’s make sense. The trick is not to make it boring. In almost every form of entertainment, this is a golden rule – never bore your audience. So how to make the blues less boring? Well, when playing in the basic keys of E and A, this can be quite tough as a lot of them sound very similar.
It’s also true that there’s nothing new in the blues, so we need tricks. Always fit in one or two breaks for example, where you can extend the basic structure and have some fun, which should rub off onto the audience.
Try to develop your own variations for turnarounds and end tags, perhaps using a different variation in each verse. Use tricks such as doubling up on the timing now and again (sometimes it even works!) Be authentic – don’t try and be bluesy and don’t try to be like the old blues legends, because you are not. Our lives are totally different.
Author: Jim Bruce
Date: 2014-10-07
Category: Music
