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Home ❯ Topics ❯ Blues-Inspired ❯

One Riff, Played Five Ways (Key of E, Blues Groove)

Lesson #381 • Jul 31, 2021

Video lesson

Instructional PDF 1 page

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It includes all of my notes for this lesson, allowing you to follow along at your own pace. You're free to download, print, and share the PDF across your devices.

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Editor’s notes

Hello my friends! Lesson today where I’ll teach you a relatively simple bluesy riff in the open E position –– and then show how you can play that same riff in 4 other places on the fretboard. This comes out of practice and noodling I’ve been doing this past week, using my FretMonster tool as an aid to help me see these possibilities. If you, like me, are interested in taking some early steps into extending your lead guitar skillset – I trust you’ll find this lesson valuable!

To explore the fretboard as I am during this lesson, visit FretMonster and select “Key of E” along with “Major + ♭7”. This will show you the map I’m using during my lesson. And of course, in my 1-page PDF I have the different regions that each riff uses circled – in addition to showing you the tabs for each of the 5 positions. Let’s get into it!

Song that inspired this lesson

Here’s the Midland song “Mr. Lonely” whose bassline inspired this lesson. Give it a listen! Here’s the lyric video:

And here’s the director’s cut version of the music video (starring Dennis Quaid), which has a bit of non-song footage to start with:

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