Blues Shuffle Rhythm Explained
Are you confused about how to play a blues shuffle…
Have you tried and never got the hang of it…
There is an easy way to do it.
You don't have to learn anything new.
This explanation can get you playing blues shuffles immediately.
I was on a YouTube live with my friend Antony Reynaert, discussing blues rhythm guitar. Anthony had a straightforward explanation of how to think about playing blue shuffles, and it's a great unique insight into how you can start playing shuffle rhythms quickly and easily.
One of the best ways to think about shuffle rhythm, which is very familiar in blues playing, is to think of it as morse code. A shuffle in morse code would have one long note and one short note. If you wanted to play it straight, you would use two long notes.
Shuffle Rhythm:
Beat 1 Beat 2 Beat 3
Long xxxx Short
Straight Rhythm:
Beat 1 Beat 2 Beat 3
Long xxxx Long
In Chicago Blues, the morse code will still be a long first note with the second note short, but the duration of the long note will be a little bit less, and the second note will be a little bit longer. The Texas Blues is different. The Texas Blues has a very long first note, and the second note is quite short. The length of time you play the notes varies slightly, giving us the difference between Chicago Blues and Texas Blues. Varying the length of the first and last notes that are different than the Chicago and Texas Blues gives other shuffle styles their feel. These rhythms use a triplet as their pulse. You take out the middle note of the triplet to get the shuffle feel.
Anthony said in our discussion, "You can't learn this without listening to music. Learning just straight from tablature is a struggle. That's why I'm very prone, as a teacher, to giving the audio portion to my online students that I work with so they get how to play it. I want to ingrain and instill this into their brains because the intellectual level is important but getting it into your head of how it sounds like Texas shuffle and a straight feel, and all the different such styles of the Blues is important."
If you are learning to play a blues rhythm shuffle, listen to what they sound like before you try to play them. It will make the process much faster if you understand how it is supposed to sound. Just having information on how to do it will take too long or, worse, never being able to play a shuffle rhythm.
The morse code analogy is a great and straightforward explanation of how to start playing blues shuffles. Many resources I have seen struggle to explain a shuffle rhythm easily for people to understand. Typically, standard notation (sheet music) is used to try to explain a shuffle rhythm. First, you need to learn how to read sheet music and then learn basic straight rhythms. After you have that foundation, you can see what a shuffle rhythm looks like on sheet music and how they differ from straight rhythms. The thought of learning something new (that takes time )and becoming comfortable with it (takes a lot of time) to learn something specific rhythmically usually dissuades people from learning about shuffle rhythms. I have also seen other ways shuffle rhythms are explained, not using standard notation but diagrams and graphics that look nice but don't convey an easy-to-understand method of shuffle rhythms. The morse code analogy keeps it simple and lets you understand how a shuffle rhythm is created and how they can be played in one explanation. If you are serious about learning blues guitar rhythms and other aspects of blues guitar, I highly recommend checking out Antony at www.Blues guitarlessonsonline.com.
Remember ...always have fun with your guitar, and I'll see you next time…
If you are looking to learn another excellent rhythm guitar skill, you can check out my FREE lesson on how to weave lead guitar melody lines to your rhythm guitar playing here: https://rhythmguitarlessons.net/Pro
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About Mark Turko: Mark Turko is a professional guitar player and instructor with over 30 years of experience and teaches guitar lessons online.