Stop 5 of 6
Shuffle and swing
Uneven eighths, the hidden triplet and the boogie.
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Stop 5 of 6
Uneven eighths, the hidden triplet and the boogie.
So far all your eighth notes have been equal: "1 & 2 &", tick-tock, like a clock. The blues walks differently. Its eighths limp with style: one long, one short, "daa-da daa-da", like a train on the tracks or a swaying step. That sway is called the , and without it a blues sounds like an exercise. At this stop you discover the triplet hiding inside it, feel it in your body and apply it to the most famous pattern in blues guitar: the boogie.
Listen to these two strums with the same pattern, all down-up eighth notes. The first is straight; the second swung:
In the first, the upstroke lands exactly halfway through the beat. In the second it arrives later, just before the next beat. The note on the beat gets longer and the one on the "&" gets shorter. Listen a few times, nod your head or tap your foot: the second one makes you want to sway.
The shuffle is learned more with the body than with the head. Before you play:
To strum, let your hand move in triplets: down on the beat, through the air on "trip", up on "let". The hand never stops; it only decides when to hit.
In blues and rock, the snare drum hits on beats 2 and 4, and that gives the shuffle its drive. You can imitate it on guitar: accent the strokes on beats 2 and 4 a little and play 1 and 3 softer. A jazz musician's trick for practising it: set the metronome to half the tempo and hear each click as beats 2 and 4. It's disorienting at first; once you've got it, your swing will have a much more solid pulse.
Here's the sound you've heard on a thousand blues and rock and roll records. It's called the : a where the fifth alternates with the sixth, a note one whole step higher. On A5, finger 1 stays at fret 2 of the 4th string and finger 3 (or 4) stretches to fret 4.
The basic pattern is "5-5-6-6": two notes with the fifth, two with the sixth, over and over, with a shuffle feel. First hear it straight, to learn the notes, then shuffled:
Notice how the second version walks on its own? It's the same tab with a different rhythm. The same figure works on D5 (strings 4 and 3) and E5 (strings 6 and 5):
Count up from the root in the A major scale: A (1), B (2), C♯ (3), D (4), E (5), F♯ (6). The sixth of A is F♯, two frets above the fifth. Alternating 5 and 6 over a fixed root creates a small inner melody that adds movement without changing chord. A very common variant adds the minor seventh (G, fret 5) to make 5-6-b7-6: you'll see it once you know seventh chords.
Now put it all together: the 12-bar form with the boogie on every chord. The backing plays the same "5-5-6-6" boogie, so play it along with the track, locking your eighths to its swing.
Listen to these two examples. They're the same strumming pattern; one swings and the other doesn't. You'll use them in the self-check.
Example A
Example B
Goal: Play two bars of triplets and two of shuffle in a row, four times, without the shuffle straightening out.
Goal: Play two full rounds of the blues in A with the 5-5-6-6 boogie in shuffle at 90 BPM.
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