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32 Part I: You Got a Right to Play the Blues TEAM LinG
hand providing the right notes to play. So the two hands need each other,
and they must coordinate their efforts so that they move together to create
chords and single notes in rhythm. In blues guitar playing, unlike large governmental
bureaucracies, the right hand must know what the left hand is
doing, and vice versa.
Lines guide your left-hand fingers
Look at the guitar’s fingerboard (the top of the neck; refer to Figures 2-3
and 2-4) and you see a gridlike structure of strings and frets (short metal
wires underneath the strings, running perpendicular to them). Frets are like
the black and white keys of the piano: They provide all the different pitches
available on the guitar in half-step increments. Good guitar players, who
“know the fingerboard,” can identify any string/fret location by its pitch
(note name), no matter where it falls. The better guitar player you become
the more you’re able to look at the neck and quickly see notes and patterns.
Shifting acoustic to overdrive:
Electric guitars
As soon as electric guitars were available, blues players of the day made the
transition quickly and easily from their acoustic versions. An electric guitar
uses the same approach to neck and frets and the way the left and right
hands share separate but equally important roles (see the preceding section
for the basics), but it provides some aspects that the acoustic guitar can’t do
or can’t do as well, in addition to the most obvious advantage: increased
volume through electronic amplification. The amplified electric guitar certainly
changed the music world, but in many more ways than just being able
to be heard over the rest of the band. The entire tonal character changed, in
addition to the way you had to play it.
Technologically speaking, an electric guitar is no more complicated than an
eighth-grade science project: A wire (the string) hovers over a magnet (the
pickup), which forms a magnetic field. When you set the wire in motion (by
plucking it), the vibrating, or oscillating, string creates a disturbance in the
magnetic field, which produces an electrical current. This current travels
down a cord (the one sticking out the side of your guitar) and into an amplifier,
where it’s cranked up to levels that people can hear — and in some
cases, really hear. Figure 2-5 shows a close-up of the sound-producing parts
of an electric guitar: the string and pickup.