Get Started Playing LEAD - Blues Lead Technique Tips

Answering Terry's question about stopping the high E and B strings from ringing out when playing on lower strings. Many players who've been playing for years practice scales in a very clean, vertical finger position, but that's never how you'd actually play blues or rock lead guitar.

The muting technique: Hook your thumb over the top of the neck with your first finger wrapping around the inside of the fretboard. When you do this, the first finger automatically touches the B and E strings, muting them while you play on the lower strings. This means those thinnest two strings never ring out during blues licks.

"Purple Haze" demonstrates this perfectly: The riff goes from string six to string four (frets 9-7-9-7-5-7), and when playing that note on string four, you hit it on the inside/side of your first finger, not the tip like you would for chords. This allows you to give it vibrato by moving your finger or wrist, and crucially, four strings are muted just by this first finger position (strings 2, 3, and 5), while the thumb mutes string six.

This means no matter how much fuzz and overdrive you use, you can strum all six strings and only the notes you want ring out - everything else is muted by that first finger. Your index finger is key to blues because it's the only one that works unsupported. When using your third finger for string bending, it's usually supported by the middle finger or even the first finger too, but the first finger works alone.

The "Ballad of John Henry" riff in drop D (0-5-3-5-0 then just 3, or 5-3-5 together) demonstrates this muting approach. Once looped, you can relax and solo over it using D minor pentatonic - but don't start from the root on string six, start from the octave on the thinner strings where all the good stuff happens in pentatonic shape one.