Cool Country & Blues Riffs (Acoustic Guitar)

Here’s one of those riffs that sits right at the crossroads of country and blues. Colin picked it up years ago, and it’s stuck around because it just plain sounds good, especially on acoustic guitar. It’s based on the E pentatonic minor scale, played over an E7, with one twist that gives it a character all its own.

Watch Colin break it down and show you how the riff works in a few different positions:

The Pentatonic Minor With a Twist

The riff lives in the E pentatonic minor scale, but Colin adds a major third (G#) that changes the whole flavor. The pentatonic minor normally has a minor third (G natural), and when you hammer from that G up to the G#, from minor to major, it creates that classic country-blues sound.

Colin calls it an inverted third. Whatever you call it, that movement from minor to major is what makes the riff sound like it belongs on a front porch in Mississippi or a honky-tonk in Nashville. Same riff, different attitude.

How to Play It

The basic move: pick the G string (3rd string open), hammer on from G natural to G# (that’s the minor-to-major third move), and let the open E string ring out over top of it. The E provides your root, and the hammer-on creates the melody underneath.

Then you drop down to the D note, the flat seventh. That flat seven is what makes up the E7 chord, so the riff follows the chord perfectly. Every note in the riff belongs to the E7 sound.

It’s one of those riffs that sounds complicated when you listen to it, but the actual mechanics are pretty straightforward. The hammer-on does most of the work.

Moving to Other Keys

Colin shows that you can move this riff up the neck. Slide the whole shape up to the A position and you’ve got the same riff over A7. Move it to B and you’ve got B7 covered.

That gives you the I-IV-V progression in the key of E: E7, A7, and B7. Three riffs from one pattern. If you’re playing a 12-bar blues in E, you’ve now got something melodic to play over every chord change instead of just strumming.

Country or Blues? Both.

The key of E is a natural home for both country and blues guitar. Something about those open strings and that low E rumbling underneath works for either genre. The same riff can sound bluesy and raw or twangy and bright, depending on how you attack the strings.

On acoustic guitar especially, this riff has a warmth to it that fills up a room. You don’t need a full band. Just you and the guitar.

If you’re working on building your blues rhythm guitar vocabulary, riffs like this are gold. They’re small enough to memorize quickly and flexible enough to use in all kinds of musical situations.

If you want to explore more blues rhythm techniques, try the shuffle strum pattern for the classic muted blues rhythm, or learn the acoustic blues guitar boogie for a walking bass pattern in the key of A.

Have fun with it. And remember, if it sounds good, it is good.