Blues Rythm Guitar: Good songs to practice?

[reutbing0]

First of all: Hi everybody. I'm a budding Dutch guitar guitar player (mostly blues and classic rock stuff) and I recently found his website, so here I am ! This really seems to be a very good resource site and a nice place to chat about guitar-related topics.

Now, for my question... I like blues music ,and one of my main goals is to become a competent blues player. However, I've got some problems improving my rythm guitar playing. I've got the basic shuffle patterns down, I'm able to move it around the neck and to put some movement in the bass. I also now quite a few chords (7th, maj7th, 9th, 13th in closed positions and of course the funky 7#9). Where I'm having trouble is making these chords rythmically interesting and adding some funk to my playing, I also find comping for slow blues difficult. I was wondering if any of you guys could point me to some good practice material/songs available on the web (tab would be great but not absolutely necessary). Thanks !

-Jeroen

[Bongo Boy]

This may be way too basic for you, but I found that the Berklee Press publication, Blues Improvisation (that' not the entire title, but I can't remember it exactly) is very useful for me, as a real beginner. The CD includes 12 slow-tempo, and 12 faster-tempo 12-bar blues tracks.

Each set of 12 tracks includes different keys and different styles, with left channel having drums and bass, right channel drums and piano comp. Each track is 12 choruses long, and allows you to learn what's up with the chord progressions, etc.

Like I said, it's quite basic, but you may want to look it up and see if you think it would help. It's all new to me, and I'm still trying to train my ear to hear what's going on with the walking bass thru those 4-bar sections. I had no idea all that was going on in a simple little 12-bar blues--in fact, I still don't.