Play like Stevie Ray Vaughan

Stevie Ray Vaughan played Texas blues with enormous energy: a driving shuffle, heavy strings, a loud amp and bends that hit like a punch. Think of "Pride and Joy" or "Texas Flood". This chapter breaks the Stevie Ray Vaughan style into five techniques you can practise one by one, in his favourite key of E.

You start with the Texas shuffle, bass line and chord chops played at once with muted scratches filling the gaps. Then you learn raked bends, where a quick sweep across muted strings makes the bent note explode. Open-position E licks use pull-offs against open strings and the minor-to-major G to G# rub, and slides into the 4th and 5th frets make those licks sound vocal. The chapter ends with turnaround licks in E that close a 12-bar blues and send it back to the top.

Every exercise is a tab that plays in your browser with a click and a tempo ladder, and a checkpoint ends each lesson. Along the way you'll get practical tone tips for an SRV-style sound: a single-coil guitar and a clean amp turned up until it growls.