50 Electric Blues Guitar Licks

Everyone gets the blues, says Skip McDonald, who should know. The legendary guitarist gets them - like, really gets them - more than most. The blues are a fact of life, he adds in a Dayton, Ohio twang undiminished by two decades of UK living. It doesn't matter where you are. The blues have no boundaries. An old school bluesman in the tradition of everyone from Howling Wolf and Leadbelly to Blind Willie Johnson, McDonald channels the past into the future through his internationally regarded project, Little Axe. A project that is more than just a band: it's a collective of different people who, at certain periods, come together to create great work.

Songhoy Blues are a young and exuberant Malian band who already have a remarkable history behind them. They fled from their homes in the north when radical Islamists overran the region, and on reaching the safety of Bamako, decided to form a band – at which point their fortunes dramatically changed. They came to the attention of Amadou & Mariam’s manager, Marc-Antoine Moreau, who was looking for musicians who could record with the Africa Express team when they came to town; they also collaborated with Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the AE’s Maison Des Jeunes set. Now comes their first full album, co-produced by Moreau and Zinner, and it’s an impressively varied and rousing set, if somewhat predictable. There’s electric desert blues (Nick), slinky, acoustic ballads (Petit Metier), and reworkings of songs from the Songhoy tradition. A band to watch.

Learn how to play 50 tasty blues-rock licks inspired by Stevie Ray Vaughan “That kid woke the blues back up.” - Buddy Guy 500 years from now, the blues will still be very much alive. As they are prone to do today, musicologists, critics and blues aficionados will still be crafting top-ten blues guitarist lists and debating who was the greatest of them all. Meanwhile, students of guitar just like us will be copping SRV licks because there will never be an artist who has had as much impact and influence on electric blues guitar as Stevie Ray Vaughn.