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Unlike classical guitar playing, blues guitar has no pre-existing beliefs on the right way to play and hold your instrument. This lack of a formal approach frees you from the normal way of learning, which is to listen to someone else tell you how to do something the right way — and call you out when you’re doing it wrong.

In the blues, you can’t really be doing something wrong, unless it either hurts
or sounds bad. That’s because the blues is a folk art — an art created by ordinary people — and doesn’t carry around the baggage of established rules that some other art forms do. But you can observe some simple guidelines that help you play comfortably, efficiently, and, by all means, without pain.For the blues guitarist, any pain associated with playing should come from the heart, not your fingers or lower back!

Holding your guitar should feel as natural as picking up a baby. Don’t think too much about it; just treat it with love, and you’ll do fine. Once you have your baby — er, your guitar — in your arms, use the info in the following sections so you’re comfortable while you figure out how to fret notes and strum strings.

One of the best things about the blues — and a huge relief to beginning  guitarists — is that the blues isn’t all that hard to play, technically speaking.Playing lead or rhythm in most blues songs requires only intermediate technique.
What is harder to do — in fact, you never stop figuring out how to do it better — is to play expressively. Expression in the blues is what turns craft into art. Check out these ways to make your music more bluesy:

• Use bent notes. Bent notes are notes where the pitch is raised slowly upwards in a continuous fashion, and this element is closely identified with the blues.
• Make your music shake. Vibrato is a technique that makes the notes of the music quiver by using left-hand finger wiggling, which gives blues a signature sound. B.B. King is well known for his expressive and soulful vibrato. Because much of the blues is set to medium tempos, players hold notes for long periods of time. Vibrato is a great way to bring notes to life, so they don’t just sit there.
• Give it some slide. If you don’t hit notes straight on and rather slide into notes from above and below, you give music a bluesy feel and breathe some life into your notes. Guitarists often draw their inspiration from vocalists and horn players (saxophone, trumpet, trombone, and so on), who exercise the slide technique on a regular basis.
• Slur your notes. Connecting notes through slurs — where you don’t restrike the second note with the right hand — is a good way to loosen up your playing in the typical way a blues player does.
• Allow the rhythm to flow. Blues also allows a certain rhythmic liberty to be taken with melodies and especially letting the melody notes deliberately fall after, or behind, the beat. Backphrasing is actually more of a rhythmic alteration, or rubato, but it’s generally thought of as a phrasing technique. It’s been described as lazy, devil may care, or cavalier, but it sure makes the notes sound more bluesy.