So B.B. King guitar style is one of the most recognizable in all blues of course. And there are a few things that really make it unique, and the first thing that comes in mind is his Vibrato. Of course, he has that fast Vibrato, fluttery Vibrato which is really unique. He's one of the only guitar players that I can think of that actually makes that work. Most guitar players, you notice have a slow Vibrato like Hendrix or Clapton that kind of slow Vibrato up and down. His Vibrato is really is about a pivoting motion. You see my thumb is up here, I am just going to rock in the hand back and forth.
So whatever reason he almost always does it with the first finger and that is with the first finger like that. So you always just want to practice an even Vibratos, you don't want an erratic one where you are pulling the string to different pitches. You want to try them has it even and fast. So, practicing that randomly around the fret board is really having a loose wrist with that too. Obviously, it's critical. So, like most blues guitar players, he plays between the local phrases, and that's because he literally thinks of his guitar as if it were a singer, and he really doesn't play a lot of chords, he plays mostly lead. So, it's like he sings, and then his guitar sings back and forth.
So, the space between the phrases that he plays, are like sentences in a paragraph. Like as any good blues solo, how does those rest between the phrases. If you just think of it like, if he had a run on a sentence that went on forever without a punctuation it would really be lame. So that of course is just general blue stuff but --
Audio Problem
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And another really important thing in blues and especially B.B. King's playing is dynamics, playing so note loud and some notes soft, when in that beginner or an intermediate phase everything is the same volume. But some things like, I hit that G#, when I just played you might have not even heard it, that kind of stuff. So, it ascend that note and this comes down. So you are just making sure that some of that will stand out and other ones are really hidden or are subtle, grace notes.
Then the only other real thing that we need to cover is tone. Of course, I am using a solid body electric guitar, with a bridge pickup humbucker. His guitar obviously is a hollow body Gibson, and that has a really unique sound also, pretty much using his bridge pickup for a lot of his playing and he has a brighter tone, but he rolls some of the tone off so it's not too screechy. It's definitely a fat, warm bridge pickup tone.
If you listen some of his really early stuff in the 50s, he's actually playing a telecaster, usually with bridge pickup. So that has a super bright tone, you'll notice his sound early on in the early days is real bright, compared to his later years. So that's a little bit about the style of B.B. King.
Pull that up a whole step, 11th fret on the 1st string, 13th on the 2nd and 11th A on the 2nd string, bending the 10th fret up a whole step. The idea is to get with this phrase, from this upper position of the C Blue Scale, into this 8th fret position. He always does it along --.
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