Rhythm will make or break your blues guitar playing.

I know that sounds a little dramatic, but I do sometimes like to err on the side of the dramatic…

It’s also true. Two or three notes played with great feel and timing will always sound better than a technically impressive phrase played without it. And when it comes to the blues, one of the most important rhythmic feels to get under your fingers is the swing feel.

If you haven’t come across swing before, don’t worry – in this lesson we’re going to break it down step by step.

And if you’ve heard the term but never been quite sure how it works in practice, this lesson should clear that up too. Either way, by the end of the lesson you’ll have a simple exercise you can take straight to the guitar to start practicing the swing feel so that you can actually implement it in your playing.

Let’s dive in!

Step 1 – Start with the triplet feel

The starting point for swing is something called the triplet feel.

I actually cover this in some depth in an article on blues rhythms and the blues shuffle. So if you want to go deep on the theory, that’s a great place to start.

Here though we’re also going to cover all of the essentials so we’ve got a solid foundation to build from.

In my opinion, the best way to understand the swing rhythm is to first start with a discussion around straight time.

When you play eighth notes in straight time, every note has the same rhythmic value:

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and

We actually encounter this rhythm quite commonly in the blues. However if you play it over a 12 bar progression that uses dominant 7th chords, you’ll notice that it doesn’t sound quite right, and lacks the rhythmic feel that we associate with the blues.

The first step towards getting there is moving from these straight eighth notes towards triplets.

A triplet takes one of those eighth note groupings – the “1 and” – and squeezes three notes into the space of two. So instead of two notes, you get three:

1 and a, 2 and a, 3 and a, 4 and a

This rhythm appears constantly in blues, and it’s particularly clear in slow blues songs in 12/8 time. Two great examples to listen to are Gary Moore’s “Still Got the Blues” and “Need Your Love So Bad” (played by Peter Green with Fleetwood Mac).

In “Still Got the Blues” especially, Gary plays an arpeggiated chord progression that highlights those triplets beautifully as he is playing a note on each of those rhythmic subdivisions.

Being able to hear and count that triplet feel is an essential first step.

But if you try to play all three notes of every triplet in more upbeat musical contexts, you’ll hear that it creates a wall of sound that’s busy and overwhelming, and not particularly bluesy sounding.

To change this, we need to take those triplets and make them swing.

Step 2 – Bring the swing

We can move from that potentially busy and overwhelming triplet sound by taking our triplet grouping – 1 and a – and removing the middle note.

So instead of three evenly spaced notes, you now have two. The “and” disappears, and you’re left with 1 – a, 2 – a and so on.

What you end up with is a long-short, long-short pattern. The first note is held for longer, and the second note is shorter and falls just before the next beat.

It’s this pattern that creates the loping, forward-moving feel that defines swing.

Technically, what’s happening is that the first note of the triplet extends to take the value of a quarter note, while the remaining note becomes an eighth note that fills the rest of the space.

The maths can get complicated quickly (and goes way above my head!) so don’t worry about that too much. Instead just listen out for that long-short pattern and start to internalise the groove in your body.

Once you’re able to do that, the exciting part begins as you can begin to alter the feel of the swing.

For example, you can play a very tight swing, where the first note is clipped and there’s a clear space before the short note.

Or you can stretch that first note right out, so the two notes seem to roll into one another. This variation is a big part of what creates the different feels and vibes you hear between different blues players and songs – even when they’re all working from the same basic rhythmic idea.

Step 3 – Mix and match

Understanding how swing works is a great first step. However we need to bring it to life on our guitars, which can be challenging at first.

To help, here’s a simple exercise that I love to use personally and with students that I coach.

Set a metronome at a comfortable tempo – I’d suggest around 80 BPM, but you can adjust to a tempo that works for you.

Take the 5th fret on the low E string in the key of A, and then play through the following stages and rhythms, without stopping between them:

• Straight eighth notes: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and

• Full triplets: 1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and a

• Swung triplets (remove the middle note, extend the first): 1 – a 2 – a 3 – a 4 – a

• Straight into a 12 bar blues progression: use the swing feel you’ve just established, keeping all downstrokes to keep the picking hand simple

The key to this exercise is to not stopping between the stages.

When you move through them in one continuous take you can feel the differences between the different rhythms.

You’ll hear exactly how the rhythm shifts at each step, and what you need to do mechanically in the picking hand, and this all builds up beautifully to you playing through an actual 12 bar blues progression at the end.

As you work through the exercise and gain more confidence with it, focus on these two things:

• The gap before the short note. In a tight swing, this space is clear and clipped whereas in a looser swing, it almost disappears. As you get comfortable targeting the swing rhythm experiment with both and notice how the feel changes.
  

• The forward motion. When you lock in with the swing feel, there’s a natural momentum to it and each long-short group of notes seems to push into the next one. If it feels laboured or stop-start, slow the tempo down and focus on relaxing the strumming hand.

Don’t worry if this doesn’t come straight away or if it feels a bit inconsistent at first. You don’t need to dedicate hours of practice time or exclusively practice with the metronome for this to all fall into place.

Take your time, spend a few minutes on the exercise outlined above every time you practice, and you’ll soon be playing in the pocket and locked into the swing rhythm.

Good luck, have fun – and let me know below if you have any comments or if I can help at all! 😁

Image – Unsplash