How to Get That Blues Rock Guitar Sound

Getting “That” Blues Rock Guitar Sound Like Jimi Hendrix

Many people around the world love blues, and if you’re like me, you also love the amazing guitar solos of Jimi Hendrix. That’s why many people consider Jimi to be the most influential guitarist to ever grace the planet!

Blues and rock guitar playing tends to have a characteristic sound to it. Sure there is a style of playing that characterizes blues guitar, infact this guitar style is covered fully in the Jamorama course. The course provides blues Jam tracks and blues songs, and will teach you how to play the blues guitar.

But a question that often pops up is “Once I know how to play the style, how do I get that “sound” out of my amp?”. Let’s first look at the components for achieving that bluesy rock sound:

• Guitarist’s ability to play the blues style
• Choice of guitar – For example, electric or acoustic guitar? Solid body or semi-acoustic, single coil pickups or humbucking pickups?
• Choice of amplifier & the settings on the amplifier
• Settings on the guitar
• Miscellaneous details such as, guitar strings, effects pedals, etc.

So, from this list we can see that there is simply not one aspect that will directly change the sound, it’s the use of all of these things that point to the final outcome. A nice way of looking at it is to treat all of these aspects as ingredients to the sound recipe. By changing the ingredients or amount of, or order in which they are used you end up changing the final product.

Obviously one of the most important of the ingredients is the ability of the guitar player themselves. There is no point in having all of the ingredients to play blues guitar if the player can’t actually play blues style guitar, make sense?

Let’s start with the guitar itself, the best choice of guitar would be a solid body electric guitar such as a Fender Stratocaster, or a Gibson lespaul. Pretty much any solid body electric guitar will do.

Once you have selected a guitar let’s look at the settings that are to be used on the guitar itself. You will want to select the neck pick up (the pickup that is closest to the neck of the guitar).

This pickup gives a more rounded natural sound, often called the rhythm pickup. The on board controls of the guitar (the volume and tone knobs) are also very useful. To achieve a bluesy sound you should slightly roll off some of the tone knob, roll it back to about 7 or 8.

After you have this set up, look at the amplifier. Blues guitarists have a slightly over-driven or distorted sound. To achieve this I want you to make sure that you are plugging the guitar into the “Hi-gain” input of your amplifier (if you only have one input then use that one.

What you need to do next is to turn up your amp gain to a point where the sound coming out is slightly distorted (on most amps this would be just after halfway). If your guitar amp doesn’t distort or overdrive then there are other alternatives, you could purchase and use a distortion effect pedal.

Ok, the amplifier’s EQ settings …what do you do with those? Basically you need to leave all the “EQ” knobs in the middle (i.e. don’t boost or drop any of them).

The bluesy sound really comes from having selected the neck pick up and by having the amp slightly distorting. Follow these tips, and I guarantee you that your next blues solo will now actually sound like a blues solo. Get into it!

These tips on how to get that rock blues sound are provided to you by Ben Edwards, Owner of Jamorama.

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