How do I learn to play the blues on a guitar?

It is not going to be particularly easy. At first you will not sound good. Your fingers will hurt. You won't hit the right notes. Your tone will be poor and your rhythm will be off. Be prepared for this. You can move past it. The first step is to listen. Choose some music that you really like and listen for the guitar in it. Note whether the notes are carrying the rhythm or the melody. Listen to the spaces in-between playing notes. Listen how little actual playing there is in many songs. After that, get a guitar and find an instructor. Or find an instructor and then get a guitar. Depending on the type of blues the guitar can be anything from a small acoustic to a heavily amped electric. They are very different and approaches to playing them are different too. After you get the basic technique, just keep listening and learning some of the basic chord positions and progressions. Then practice.

I really like 's answer because he clearly states what the rest world seems content to gloss over: It's all in the timing. 99% of guitar players get all obsessed with the notes. But the difference between sounding ok and sounding amazing is almost always time & feel. Getting your time and feel together is difficult but worth it. Learn to love your metronome early on, and you win at guitar.

I agree with the previous posters regarding timing. Timing is so, so very important - it's almost the whole point. But to add to that, the blues is a strange animal that isn't really right on the western scale. It is full of half pitches and inflections (which is great for guitarists and vocalists who can bend notes to their will). To learn how to play it right, you'll need to listen to a whole lot of it... especially the vocalists. You need to get the sound on your ear. A lot of people mentioned finding a good teacher. It's good advice, but it can be tricky - a bad teacher is worse than no teacher... and as a beginner, how would you know if they were good or not?! It's a nasty catch 22 (and I know from experience, I wish I could go back in time and get my money back from a couple of idiots "teachers" from the past!). So my advice is to learn from a variety of materials - books, videos, blogs and communities and a teacher (or a succession of them). Compare the sources and keep your bullsh*t detector on high alert! But most important: 1. listening to a LOT of good blues 2. learn to groove in the pocket - every note should be consistent and deliberate ...many of the greatest blues guitarists are 100% self taught - and regardless of where you get your learning material, at the end of the day the blues is an improvised art, so it always comes down to just you and your guitar, alone, focused on figuring out how to make the sounds with your own fingers. (and f**k the pentatonic - is a finger trap that limits potential and turns otherwise sensible people into gibbering cliche machines. There are 11 notes and they are all excellent!)

Don't think about theory at all. Don't think about having a method. Don't think about technique. Just listen to some blues records and try your best to play along. Try and copy what you hear. Then think about the things that make you sad. Think about when your heart was broken. Think about when somebody put you down. Think about all the troubles that plague the world. Take all that emotion and put it into the guitar. Bend a lot of notes. Its like crying.

Try to play the solo from Slim Harpo's "I'm a King Bee". It has exactly one note... Just sting it! If you can play one note right, and you like to play that note, then you can consider yourself a guitar player. If it's a note in a blues song, then by definition, you're a blues guitar player. There's more truth in this than there appears to be. I play guitar for more than 20 years, but lucky for me I never forgot to appreciate playing just one note. After you've appreciated that note, you can add one note extra. And before you know it, you're 20 years further with all the notes in your pocket. Easiest record to play along: Muddy Waters "Hard again" if you play just one or two notes. Hardest to play along: same record, if you play all the notes. But then again, who wants to play all of some other people's notes...?

First you have to have some "life" happen do you can feel it. This sounds like a silly platitude but I think it's really true. Blues is about finding the joy in sadness and the sadness in joy. There's little worse than fake blues. Second, listen to good players, not just guitarists. Check out Bobby Blue Bland and Nina Simone, not just Eric Clapton and SRV. Third, learn to play less. Do it with few notes, not many. One of the heaviest, most bluesy players to my mind was the late Paul Kossof. He played clean and could get so much from just a few notes. Those notes hit hard. Fourth, cliches are bad. Cliches are good too. Those blues shuffles are OK but try not playing them. Throw in some other chords, not just the I-IV-V. Sing your lines so you don't just play licks. Play in keys besides just E. But play a totally stock shuffle in E!

Start easy: cheap guitar, open tuning, bottleneck, steel, or bone slide. Vestapol - Elizabeth Cotten: Late August edit: That's pretty much how I learned blues, starting c. 1966. No teacher, no ewetubes, a crap guitar and a handful of LPs, and if I was really lucky, someone like Elizabeth Cotton on  a PBS show. A lot of answers here talk about timing and (shudder) metronomes. All well and fine for almost any other western style, but that's not where The Blues live in my heart. Yes, timing is almost everything, but not on every note! (That's for drummers...) If you listen to really early blues, like around 1900 - 1920 or so, you may notice a lot of syncopation, where notes are played around the beat instead of on it. That's a big part of the emotional component to Blues; unlike more rigid musical structures, the Blues breathe. That naturally irregular timing makes a foundation on which to build joy or sadness, with blue notes, slides, bends, and bounce. That's not to say one shouldn't keep proper time. Rather, it's important that one's rhythm align to the rest of the song but only on one or a few beats per measure. If you play the first note on the beat, playing the sevond slightly behind adds a sense of melancholy. Easy to overdo, but if its missing it isn't blue. The great thing about the Blues is its general simplicity; got three chords? Groovy! That takes me back to where I started: Elizabeth Cotton's demo of vestapol tuning: in open key (I use D a lot) the three essential chords are all one shape: straight across open, at the fifth fret, and the seventh fret. There are a couple of two finger formations that add a lot, but aren't essential.

Newcomers to the guitar usually find it difficult to tell the difference between music that is easy to learn and music that is difficult to learn. So they often make the mistake of investing a great deal of time and effort into learning something really hard to learn. This is not the most efficient way to develop as a guitarist. The very best starter tunes are those that sound reasonably cool, but above all, are dead easy to learn and to practice. The great thing about blues guitar is that you can always build on something basic. But investing too much time into developing the fancy details is a mistake for the beginmner who hasn't yet mastered the fundamentals of timing, rhythm and feel (as many other posters have rightly mentioned here). Here's a FREE video lesson covering a little blues tune specifically written precisely to teach complete beginners some of the basics of blues. You can learn it in minutes and then spend many hours building on it as your confidence and technical ability grows... http://www.secretguitarteacher.com/quora/ssb.php?lp_id=559

Three basic steps: 1. Learn the basics of strumming chords and playing single notes. When you start to play guitar the first two things to learn are strumming simple chords, starting with open chords, and playing individual notes on strings, to make melodies. You could use any number of guides to do this- I'd recommend Justin Sandercoe's online lessons. You need a basic level of proficiency before you can start to specialise in blues. 3 months would be enough if you practiced well every day, and had a teacher to help you correct technique issues. 2. Start learning the blues style. Building on the chords and single note playing you learned as a foundation, you then add blues specific knowledge and techniques. This consists mainly of: The minor pentatonic scale- the scale which blues melodies and solos are based on. You learn this eventually all over the guitar neck, but in the beginning, one or two 'shapes' are all you need. Blues chords- these are called '7th' chords and they have a bluesy sound. Blues chord sequences- like the '12 bar blues'. At the early stage you learn positions if the scale, and example blues melodies that use it. A great book to start with is 'Blues you can use' by John Ganapes. 3. Develop your own approach to improvisation. After you've learned the component parts of blues- the scales, chords, chord sequences, and some example tunes - you then start learning to use these tools to make your own music. This usually involves 'noodling' over backing tracks and experimenting. As the years go by, your improvisation skills and style develops.