Chords for Acoustic Guitar Lesson - Robert Johnson Blues Lesson with Scott Ainslie - Part 1

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_ _ _ [F#m] _ _ _ _ [Am] _
_ [E] _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ [A] _
_ _ _ _ _ _ [N] I'm Scott Ainsley and we're here to talk about Robert Johnson's guitar styles today.
My guitar is a 1931 National.
This came out of a pawn shop in Columbus, Georgia in the middle of the first Gulf War.
And right now it's in open A tuning.
To get here with a sort of a wooden guitar that you might be afraid to throw up into
A tuning, you could go to G with a 14 fret guitar and capo there and my neck joint is
at the [Fm] 12th fret.
So you'd get to the same place as I am that way.
[A] _
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_ We're going to take a look at some of the slide techniques Robert uses first, his right
and left hand.
He's muting behind the slide with a finger back here to stop the back resonance of the string.
And he's doing a lot of right hand muting where he's blocking off strings and only letting
one or two strings show at a time.
I'm moving this window of opportunity and the mutes around so I'm only opening one or
two strings at a time.
With my thumb going again in space above the string that I want to play with my index finger
or index and middle like that.
So the back of my thumb is killing the bass string resonant and you get this. _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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[A] This is a chunk of Robert's come out of my kitchen.
He's got this nice drop from the 7th at the 3rd fret on the 4th string back [D] to [A] this sort
of A minor 7 shape _ and then out.
So you have this _ thing going on which is a very nice detail.
He didn't have to do that.
It's counterpunnel.
[C#] _ _ [D] _ _ [A] _
[Em] The 4th string goes down while the 2nd string goes up.
And _ then all these slides happen up here at the 10th and 12th fret except for the tag
which happens down here at the 5th fret.
So here's it nice and slow. _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ [G#] _ _ [A] _ _
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_ _ _ _ _ [B] _ _ [A] _
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There's a lot of staccato playing here and what it keeps, it allows your slide playing
to not sound like finger painting looks.
_ And that's done by lifting the slide just barely off the string and letting the finger
behind stop the noise like this. _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ Same thing down [G] here.
_ [E] _ _ [B] _ _ [A] _
_ _ _ Now here.
I'm actually stopping the noise with this finger.
So we're really cleaning up, controlling the noise that's coming out of the guitar.
What we're doing here is lifting the slide barely and letting the finger behind stop
the note so you get nice clean staccato playing.
_ _ _ The [D#] last lick in our series [Am] down here is_
[C#] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ [A] _ _ _ _ _ _
_ And this little_
Johnson uses a lot.
That's thumb, finger, thumb.
You have to back your arm up a little bit to catch that.
_ _ _ _ _ [N] _