Hi, my name is Steve Moore, and welcome to my lesson series teaching the guitar of the great Chuck Berry. And the song I just played for you or at least I played part of it for you is called guitar Boogie. And that is the song back in 1978 or so that inspired me to want to play the guitar, like Chuck Berry. And in this lesson series, I am going to show you all the basics that you need to play the Chuck Berry style of guitar. And this series is geared more for absolute beginners. But players of any level if you've never tried to play some Chuck Berry stuff before, I'm sure you can find something here that that you can learn from something useful that you can work into your own plane.

My goal here is not to be an expert on Chuck Berry's playing. I am not a professional musician. I'm a high school teacher who also on the side play some blues and every now and then some old style rock and roll things like that. I teach a lot Guitar online, I have an old channel called Old School blues guitar where I teach mostly traditional, acoustic and electric blues. But I've always loved Chuck Berry style. And what I've done here is I've tried to share all the things that I've learned over 30 plus years of listening to Chuck Berry and trying to figure out how to play the things that I hear him play.

I don't know how to play everything Chuck Berry played, I've never never met the guy while he was alive. I never talked to anybody who played with the guy. All these things I'm going to show you I figured out by listening and or by talking to other guitar players or picking up clues from Chuck's live performances or interviews with Chuck Berry himself or other people who play guitar with Chuck bear. Simply put, I've done the best I could here and I think while you might not find everything I show you to be 100% exactly the way Chuck Berry did it. I think you'll find that most of it is probably pretty accurate. Pretty darn good.

Close to what he did. And above all, if you're getting into this series I'm hoping that you Your goal is not to play note for note what very play. What I think is a more prudent approach to this is to learn the Chuck Berry style to help you get started playing the electric guitar learning the electric guitar. And then you can take the Chuck Berry style and apply it to so many other styles whether you're playing classic rock or you're going to punk rock or grunge rock or really heavy metal. Any blue space style of music has its roots really in the Chuck Berry style, which in turn goes back to the blue sea electric blue stuff. Before you get started with the lessons I want to share just a little with you about the roots of the check Barry style and interviews conducted before his death Chuck usually cited two people as the major influences on his guitar style.

Electric bluesman Aaron t bone Walker and Carl Hogan one of the guitar players For Lewis Jordans band during the 1940s t bone Walker played a lot of single string runs and some double stops in the first position blue Xbox. Chuck Berry took quite a few of T bone Walker's licks and played them in his own unique way faster, and with double stops playing two strings at once. On the Lewis Jordan song Ain't that just like a woman? Carl Hogan played a really cool guitar intro that Chuck Berry often said was the inspiration for the guitar interest he later played on songs like Johnny be good. Carol roll over Beethoven and so many others. Listen to this.

I've tabbed out a few of T bone Walker's licks and the intro to just like a woman. These are available in the resources section of lesson number one. One other important influence on the Chuck Berry guitar style came from a piano style called Boogie Woogie popular during the mid to late 1940s. Chuck Berry said that he got the idea for his Boogie rhythms because he played on the bass strings of the guitar from the left handed figures played by guys like Pete Johnson and Albert Camus. So I'm sure Chuck Berry's guitar style is very much rooted in the blues and rhythm and blues of the late 1940s and early 1950s.