Joy To The World Blues Style

Intro & Tone

This track has such a naturally upbeat and uplifting feel to it, that we wanted to try it with an upbeat blues shuffle! We think it worked beautifully and allowed us to have a bit of fun with the main melody, adding in a variety of cool blues licks around the core notes. As the rhythm part, we've taken the core chords and made them dominant style chords, to give it that extra bluesy feel! Let's start with the tone.

The base of our tone is using a Fender Hot Rod DeVille 410 style preset in TONEX by IK Multimedia. The setting shown above are for the lead guitar part, as we are driving the gain channel pretty much to 10. We're also using a Logic digital delay pedal, with the settings shown above. For the rhythm, we simply remove the delay and roll the gain back to 12 o'clock. We also have compression and reverb as shown below.

This is a pretty quirky guitar, and you can definitely get a similar tone using any semi hollow body guitar. For the rhythm we're using the neck pickup, and for the lead we're switching to the bridge pickup (we think... The controls are pretty nuts on this thing!)

The Lead Guitar

For the lead guitar part, we are based in the key of A major, and A blues. I say blues as we're converting all the chords to dominant, rather than major, allowing us to play around with both the major scale and the minor pentatonic. We end using a few scale shapes, which are shown in the fretboard diagrams.

The Rhythm Guitar

Finally, let's take a look at the core chord movements for this track. As I mentioned above, we're using dominant chords in place of major chords to give the blues feel to the track. We're also using some cool little mini-riffs within the chord shapes, which are all laid out clearly on the tab. The basic chords are:

If you'd like to get more to grips with the blues style, get started with the Blues Essentials Level 1 today!