Copy This Blues Practice Routine — It'll 10x Your Guitar Playing

If your blues solos feel random — sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't, and you keep hitting wrong notes — today's lesson is for you. Or if you just want more creativity, emotion, and expressiveness when you take a solo, this is for you.

My name is Alec Lehrman. I've played on Grammy-nominated recordings and I've taught thousands of students how to play the blues correctly. Hint: it's not always about adding more notes. It's about adding the right notes and squeezing all the emotional juice out of every one.

We're in the key of G, operating inside the BB King blues box. On the B string you're playing the 8th and 10th frets (the 8th fret being your root, G). On the G string you're playing the 7th and 9th. Those are the notes. The whole lesson is about how to play them.

Technique 1: Quick Hammer-Ons and Pull-Offs

Take a note in the BB box. If you just sit on it, it sounds bad. If you hammer on and quickly pull off, it sounds soulful.

These are grace notes — they're almost imperceptible, but they're what BB King, Eric Clapton, and Josh Smith do constantly. Even when they're "not playing many notes," they're squeezing tons of emotional information out of every phrase by adding these little inflections.

Practice it in isolation: ninth fret, quick pull-off. Do that 20 times. Move it around the box. The hand memory builds fast.

Technique 2: Switch Your Pickups

Stevie Ray Vaughan did this all the time. Play a phrase on one pickup. Change the pickup. Play the exact same notes. The listener's ear gets woken up because the tone shifted, even though the phrase didn't.

You don't have to learn a single new scale to do this. You just have to use the gear you already have. The pickup switcher is one of the most underused tools on the guitar.

Play a phrase. Switch. Play another phrase. That's the whole technique.

Technique 3: Dynamics

Most intermediate players hit every note at exactly the same volume. It sounds aggressive, and it sounds like someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

What you want is for every note to have its own velocity. Loud, quiet, loud, quiet. Start a phrase loud and trail off, or start quiet and swell. This is how you tell stories on the guitar — and "tell a story on guitar" is advice every player has heard, but nobody ever explains how to actually do it.

This is how.

Take a three-note phrase in the BB box. Play it twice. The first time, every note is the same volume. The second time, vary them. You'll hear the difference immediately.

Technique 4: Chicken Picking (Use Your Fingers)

A lot of players hold the pick and only use the pick. Start using your middle finger to grab the higher strings.

In the BB box, this means: your pick handles the lower note, your middle finger snaps the higher note. You get a percussive pop that you simply cannot get with a pick.

This also opens up wider intervals — instead of having to jump your pick over multiple strings, your finger just grabs the high string while your pick stays on the low. And when you play chords, the finger-snap version sounds tighter and more emotional than strumming with a pick.

How to Actually Practice This

Don't try to do all four at once.

1. Play a 12-bar G blues in the BB box. Pick one technique. Focus only on that one for one full chorus.
2. Next chorus, switch to a different technique.
3. After you've worked through all four individually, start combining two — say, pickup switching plus dynamics.
4. Then combine three. Then four.

By the time you've spent a week on this, you'll be discovering your own combinations — your own creativity. The notes haven't changed. What changed is how much emotion you're getting out of each one.

That's the whole game.

Watch the original video: Copy This Blues Practice Routine, It'll 10X Your Guitar Playing

Want to go deeper?

Grab the free Blues Bootcamp. It walks through these concepts with tabs, downloadable PDFs, backing tracks, and a jam-with-me section so you can actually put this into your hands.

And if you're ready to become the blues guitarist you hear in your head, check out the Blues Guitar System — my full course. Use this link for $50 off.