ROBERT JOHNSON's Lost Blues Technique

Music today has lost many forms of expression, as computers, quanitization and autotune have become mainstream - but there is an even older and rarer form of musical expression that has been lost to history, as exemplified by blues master Robert Johnson. Join me to dig into his music and uncover it once again

[@markbraidner4455]

Apparently when the Robert Johnson box set was released in the 90s one of the execs at Columbia said at a meeting 'these Robert Johnson cds are doing really well we'll have to get him in ,do a few interviews..' etc

[@JamesHargreavesGuitar]

Hahahahaha thought that was someone in the 60s or something Heard that rumour though!

[@markbraidner4455]

Very well could have been, when the 'King of the Delta Blues Singers' album was released..wouldnt be like them to make the same mistake at least twice!

[@jerrycohen7640]

It wouldn't surprise me. And they have only gotten more stupid since then.

[@holboroman]

Was his grave in good condition?

[@WesleyWattley-xy4fg]

Honestly 😮USA 🇺🇸 recorded history?

[@swirlingfudge]

Like no doubt many of your subscribers, I work in a job where, against my will, I am subjected to Heart FM for 8 to 12 hours a day. The lack of musical variety and dynamic expression is torture for me. It really is.

[@PJMack10]

Sabotage the radio! 🚿🚿

[@JamesHargreavesGuitar]

That does not sound fun!

[@PJMack10]

@@JamesHargreavesGuitar Neither is censorship!

[@latheofheaven1017]

@swirlingfudge I'm lucky I don't have to suffer that anymore, but I have had jobs like that in the past, and I know your pain.

[@AlanDunnett-v1m]

Heart FM, the station for people who hate music but hate silence even more...

[@gothgurlfriend]

GREAT choice of subject, James. Robert Johnson is easily one of, if not the most, fascinating guitarists of all time. Keep up the great content.

[@JamesHargreavesGuitar]

Thanks, will do :)

[@robertgallagher5285]

Good 👍 post!!!

[@tubahead16]

R.J was a Brilliant musician. Singer, songwriter, and player

[@conormccolgan4758]

Sunshine of your love is a good example of the variations in tempo, ginger drags behind the beat and jack is in front of it, brilliant!

[@tassieblues]

That's not a variation in tempo. It is a constant tempo with one player ahead of the beat and one player behind the beat. James means where the actual tempo of the song/playing fluctuates, slower then faster.

[@Mark70609]

The blues sequence in the song has been altered. In fact the D rift six bars instead of four, then it’s five bars and during the solo it’s four bars and then five bars of the D rift at the end. So it is somewhat Robert Johnson like.

[@uwannaband]

Years ago I wrote a 13 1/2 bar blues (intentionally). When recording the basic rhythm track, I got lost on the last verse and (unintentionally) added another 1 1/2 bars. I liked it so much I worked out the rest of the instrumentation around that variation.

[@3XATHAT]

Well Done James, its RARE to See thisse Significant Points Highlighted !!! Keep Up the Good Work Cheers AAA

[@b00ts4ndc4ts]

I used to work for a well none car sales company as a parts delivery driver. On my first day in the van they provided my was a Robert Johnson CD, so I popped it in and wow that fella could play the blues.

[@christopher9152]

Syd Barrett, who apparently was often guided by his lyrics when writing the music, used meter changes regularly (see Bike, for example, or Octopus), and early Pink Floyd rather successfully worked his compositions up into full songs. Also: Captain Beefheart consciously took the old blues masters' expressive approach, abstracted it, and built full band avante-rock compositions upon it.

[@Juan-wo7zu]

The madcap laughs is filled with sudden changes in metre

[@adriaandorresteijn1694]

Thank you, James.When writing songs I sometimes intuitively skip bars or half a bar. Fortunately, I have a producer who doesn't say 'You got it wrong there' but he leaves it in most of the times.

[@paweida1]

In his Beatles songs, John Lennon frequently added or dropped beats and bars. The other Beatles followed along with him skillfully, "without missing a beat", so to speak.

[@JamesHargreavesGuitar]

Yeah Lennon was excellent at this, particularly from Pepper onwards

[@78tag]

...that's because they actually listened to the music that proceeded them. You want to here a genius at metre manipulation listen to Bob Wills bands - he put the SWING in country music.. The snobs thought he was just a hick who didn't how to keep time - he was way ahead of them.

[@danieleameliorossi718]

Hi James, as per usual you hit the nail on the head. I play blues and have for many years. A few really good British blues artists who do the tempo and meter streaching as a band include the wonderful Big Joe Louis & King David's Trio Royal. Keep up the good work mate. Thanks.

[@tombassi]

Good shout James

[@JamesHargreavesGuitar]

Cheers!

[@ross3818]

Something that wouldn't make it past the Auto tune is the natural 3rd. You'll hear that in the Blues and it's awesome. Muddy Waters uses variations in meter all over the place and it helps make his songs so intriguing.

[@ChorltonM21]

Neutral third!

[@geoffstockton]

The cutting edge of music is going more harmonically complex. This trend of simple harmony has been dying off for a decade and will continue to do so. Let’s not forget that Jacob Collier (who never uses click or autotune) is a multi Grammy winning artist. Charlie Puth is scoring hits like crazy. And let’s not forget also, that every era has had its mind-numbingly simplistic bubblegum, popular music, the vast majority of which gets forgotten about, leaving us to compare the very worst of today to the very best of yesterday.

[@crunchyfrog555]

I used to DJ in the 1980s and 90s. I always used to use as much tech and trickery as I could in my performances. I immediately used CDs for example because they were easy to cue up. I used a synth and sequencer to create simple fills when mixing certain tracks together that maybe didn't gel exactly. And when PCs came to the fore, I would regularly tinker with samplers and such to tweak songs. I realised quickly how music was becoming stale due to them ignoring facets like tempo, and I always used Led Zeppelin and the Beatles to demonstrate this to people. Rick Beato perhaps did the best example of this when he showed how the feel of "When the Levee Breaks" gets lost when you take the drum track and time align it. It sounds lacking. I'd urge anyone to try this for themselves. Get any software like Audacity (which is easy to use and free) or Reaper and import a track or stem and play around with time ligning to see how it feels. And oh boy, do I ever HATE autotune. I spotted it as soon as it turned up as I could spot that glassiness on the vocals long before I even knew what the thing was. Whereas tempo changes can be far more subtle and subconscious, autotune is in your face and frankly awful.

[@patriciolegett1757]

Bad tradeoff: ease of recording - but lose all humanity in the music. Ah, the joys of computers!

[@johnvcougar]

It’s ok, AI will fix it.

[@cheatlewilsonyoutube]

I love this video.Thanks James

[@TrudyTrew]

Music is seen as little more than an inconvenience since digital technology turnedit into a shallow commodity.

[@brokentiles]

👆😲

[@noeldonnelly9462]

Ornette Coleman ("Free Jazz" especially) and other jazz musicians improvised this way in the late 50s & early 60s; Captain Beefheart did it a bit later on (try "Frownland", the first track on "Trout Mask Replica"), so it can be done by a band!

[@nigelmartin3339]

So true, but not just emotion is lost. If you want your music to be fatter sounding, more dense, forget the click and the auto tune. The variations in timing and pitch will give you this.

[@Deliquescentinsight]

As always some thought provoking and well researched subjects, nice one James

[@JamesHargreavesGuitar]

Cheers!

[@SteveStrummerUK]

What an interesting topic, and so well put across James. I have a feeling that Kate Bush songs - especially her earlier stuff - were difficult for studio musicians to learn for similar 'free-form' reasons. I believe one commentator at the time described how she would come up with the lyrics first and then make the music fit the words, as opposed to the more traditional modus operandi of fitting the words to the accompaniment. John Bonham is definitely a great example of how a drummer can drive or pull back certain parts of a song - just imagine how long the conversation would have been if some producer had asked him to play to a click track! Many great examples of a drummer using dynamics to pull or push a track can be heard in the work of The Stranglers; Jet Black was a middle-aged former semi-professional jazz drummer (how punk is that!) whose skill at these techniques made a fascinating impact on their music, never more than during their electric live sets.

[@jullev6709]

Nice :) where I live i know and play with some old musician 80+ that plays blues exactly giving a damn to the 12 beats blues, just giving more importance to text and embellishments ... It's hard to keep in time playng with them ! But people reality appreciate the results, and the expressivity and participation of the audience is top.

[@roigeyari982]

He's far from the only solo blues artist who did it, virtually none of the old solo country blues players would confine themselves to 4 bars a line, 4 beats a bar etc. Big Joe Williams, Lightnin' Hopkins, all these guys go all over the place (in a good way). Even in the hillbilly country style, if you want to hear some crazy rhythms check out Frank Hutchison. The Carter Family's arrangements would also frequently include this kind of stuff.

[@christopher9152]

In the old acoustic blues, often performed solo, meter changes and shifting bars per phrase usually followed what's happening with the vocal phrasing/singing...i.e., the music follows the poetry/voice, not the other way around. When the blues moved up north to Chicago and became an electrified, full band performance set to a drum beat, a lot of the "angular" or expressive aspects got smoothed out.

[@DSteinman]

Old Time banjo/fiddle music also prizes "crooked" tunes like that, with dropped/added time.

[@Remember-r2l]

nice video James mate

[@wdbmusicchannel3849]

The Let It Be cover is truly awful.. warbling to the point that we lose the melody is another flaw in today's music. Maria Carey..?..

[@jsamc8420]

1.Music is for fans. When the fans get dumb the music has to follow.(if you want to make a decent living). 2. Sometimes people want to dance and party, not sit around and analyze every note. Artful music vs Commercial music. On some occasions both happen at the same time.

[@chrishappe5410]

i mean id blame owen morris for this type of shit, slammmed his productions, got rid of bass transients to get rid of timing discrepancies, used delays and tambourine to fill in gaps/timing errors with the drums

[@jfrankcarr]

I like what St. Vincent said recently, that the problem wasn't AI sounding more human but humans sound more like AI

[@Flukey_1970]

I agree that the style of delta blues makes it different to modern music and is primarily the artist expressing themselves. However when you do some digging into delta blues you soon learn that they didn’t know any music theory and made their own rules up. So yeah they wrote with expression as the primary source but also knew no other way

[@Matt.Willoughby]

No they didn't know any music theory 😂 they were sharecroppers and perhaps even illiterate. Reverend Gary Davis may have had some musical education but it was all done by feel

[@GizzyDillespee]

Not just by feel - they learn from other players. Even the early blues guitar innovators were learning from banjo players and especially from singers, and from any other instrumentalists they had access to. It wasn't just, "here's a guitar, figure it out". In some cases, it happens that the adults in a community jam, and interested kids are given beater instruments, and told to watch, listen and copy how the adults and older kids do it. Even relatively recently, right before the internet, it was common to hear a riff on an album, then go to the show, get a good seat early, hope they played that song, and then watch, listen and try to copy after you went home.

[@robiandolo]

In terms of Robert Johnson and Crossroads, I think what he’s doing is singing a lyrical phrase / line then following it with a slide or lead guitar response. And do he’s not working in the “12 bar blues” set but the bars as you are presenting are a result of his he plays the song.

[@aminahmed2220]

Awesome video have a great day James and also happy holiday season from Canada and also happy Christmas also I have a stomach flu ❤1🤢🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇨🇦

[@JamesHargreavesGuitar]

Happy Xmas to you too - feel better soon

[@malstainkey]

IMO you hear this often with John Lee Hooker, where his backing musicians try to play the chord changes like a strict 12 bar blues - but John Lee is following the tempo of his singing.

[@robertdiggins7578]

I've wondered about those meter changes and never looked into it, so thank you for mapping it out and proposing some rationale that makes sense. I used to wonder if it was some known pattern that I could never catch onto with casual listening. I thought it might just be spontaneous, but it makes more sense that it was purposely planned. It's harder to tell with a solo musician. Dylan did some of that as well. And they both ...made "deals with the devil" 😉

[@terryrandell3111]

I Cash Walk the line...Great Interpretation of this.

[@Mark70609]

Cream altered the length of 12 bar blues in Sunshine of your Love. The D riff is played 6 times initially, then 5 times and 4 times during the solo, the last verse returns to 5 bars if D.

[@TheBassPlayer100]

Excellent.

[@robertgallagher5285]

Robert Johnson the best Blues 💙 artist!!!

[@cph2004]

Great video

[@3XATHAT]

Right On (or Off) James...A Brilliant Expose... Ive Never Seen this Key Factor of Roberts Technique so Beautifully Explained !!! Cheers AAA

[@Plug_Socket_Man]

What if Robert Johnson wasn’t very good at his timing and everyone thinks it’s genius but really it’s just him playing how if feels when it comes to it.

[@rustypugh123]

That’s exactly what it was.

[@bryonblank4365]

Unlikely

[@rustypugh123]

@@Plug_Socket_Man there’s nothing genius or technically amazing about his playing. Personally, I love it. It’s gutsy and raw and very emotional. But it’s also sloppy and raw. But that doesn’t make any difference. It is what it is.

[@jayorag]

Oversouling is not musical expression, it's a cliché. Probably it's a reaction to the Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera"s bursting of the melismatic scalation bubble

[@toxic-o1u]

Afaik, the Beatles did similar stuff to make their music match better to their lyrics.

[@KBANFU]

A reason why I only hear today people like Estastone

[@RonJames-rb7eg]

This is the sole reason I only like the blues prog rock (Also rock such as Queen etc) and metal. No bullshit machines used to correct anything, because through pure musical skill, no automatic crap is needed. as a musician playing keyboards blues harp and guitar I have never used a click in my life.

[@JakeWarrior]

Where have the Tom Meighan videos gone?

[@jameseverall]

Have a listen to my new duo called crisp Addiction I play in open C mainly, and our songs are simple. But they are catchy, and I think they are full of life. And most people we've played our songs to start humming the melody for hours, even days after

[@craigwarner6156]

But apparently (according to "experts") most of his recordings were sped up, wether by accident due to the 78rpm way they were recorded and then transferred over to master tapes for 33rpm. Or on purpose to make them more commercial. You can tell when you hear some of the alternate takes. I'm no expert so I'm only relaying this information. Either way still amazing guitar and vocal work

[@robiandolo]

In terms of drummers you’re describing Ringo! Charlie Watts.

[@ryanmatney9013]

It could be your life's work to do this kind of analysis on the music of John Lee Hooker

[@ChrisW_Essex]

We need more Dr Feelgood

[@hackedoff736]

There was an advert during the football Euros featuring Hey Jude. When I first heard it I instantly didn’t recognise it (if you know what I mean), it sounded like McCartney on a bad day, just didn’t sound right. Then I saw an analysis claiming that it had been autotuned which it clearly was. Sacrilege apart (some suit probably thought it a good idea) it just sounded like someone doing a poor impression and to me like someone scraping their nails down a blackboard.

[@Neil-pv8pw]

What Robert Johnson is doing is what most lead singers do is ignore the drums and the band and that’s why most lead singers and dramas fall out with each other for example, Roger Daltrey Keith Moon but sting from police fame found the answer. The answer was for him to play base and he famously said by playing bass. He controls the lyrics, which are the dominant thing and has he says playing bass means it isn’t C until he says it’s C because base is the loudest instrument in the band and the most dominant all Andy Summers is doing is playing ambient chords until stings baseline changes and when the base in the guitar unify it becomes dominant, but yes, vocals lyrics are what any good musician listens to not a click track or click tracks. It also makes the band look like a bunch of zombies because they are not interacting with the audience and people go to see a band, not hear a bandand that’s what is lost today. There is no comedy. There is no interaction with the audience. You’ve just got shoe gazing through the entire set.

[@Neil-pv8pw]

I wish to add also that in live music venues, the local councils put a cap on how many decibels bands could play at, and that seriously stunted a Band’s dynamics so bands like The Who were able to play incredibly loud, which had an amazing effect when you brought everything down very low For example example won’t get fooled again again with the seeker sequencer left on its own with the incredible scream of Roger Daltrey and in my view, the last band that were allowed to play loud volume was Nirvana and I think that was the secret to their success the huge dynamic range they were allowed to operatingtoday most drummers turn up with tiny little drums, and sometimes a jam be and that has no effect on the audience so the audience talk and ignore the band

[@GizzyDillespee]

There are plenty of places in the USA where it can get loud. I think there's been an aesthetic and technical push towards more detailed and accurate sound, and more consistency in what's heard throughout the audience area. Especially in a larger venue, in the old days, people in front would get blasted by stacks - the main speakers. Now the main speakers are huge suspended line arrays, and the people in the front don't even really hear them. So, they use smaller amps to fill in the sound in front of the stage... but they only have to fill to where the line arrays take over, so they're not powerful like a wall of sound setup would've been in the old days. Then, the venue might have boundary speakers, or repeater array towers among the audience. The aesthetic is in favor of complete coverage without any spot being too loud. In smaller venues, it depends. There are places in the USA where you can get blasted, better bring earplugs. But it does seem as if the better places are going with the clean sound aesthetic. Maybe it's the Tiny Desk effect, competition with that archetype of live sound. Maybe the venue is above ground in a residential area, and compromises had to be made about curfews and also dBs. Or maybe the demographic of the audience for that type of music (The Who, Nirvana) is getting older and more concerned about hearing loss, and the ones who have money (the venue's preferred customers) tastes have evolved from cheap malt liquor to fancy drinks and wine, and same with artistic tastes... they want to hear tone more than volume, now. For up and coming bands, at less fancy venues, they probably have to supplement the venue's PA if they want it LOUD, and maybe it's a low paying gig with a long and sketchy load-in... and so on. Those are my guesses, but I'd bet that even in the UK some bands and venues dedicated to volume. I want to add... I think the change in aesthetic goes hand in hand with increased ticket prices. At those venues, it feels like they're trying to gentrify live sound, somehow. The sound reinforcement system went from coffee to cappuccino, and so did rent prices, so to speak. And furthermore, starting with numetal, after grunge, dynamic compression became a big part of the mainstream rock sound... which greatly reduced dynamic range. So, Linkin Park can drop out all of the instruments except a piano line, and then bring everything back in all of the sudden... but the dynamic difference isn't so great, because it's been compressed so hard. Live sound inherently is going to be much more dynamic than a studio recording, but if that's the sound the band is known for, and the audience wants to hear, then what do you expect they'll do? Metal band in 2025: "You said you wanted the live drumming to sound like the album, so for this tour, we've replaced our drummer with samples." What I'm getting at... styles that used to be about speed and power evolved into speed and precision. Maybe there will be a backlash, the pendulum will swing back the other way? I pray for peoples' ears if it does😂. Maybe both kinds of venues can coexist. Richard Dawson has made music with as mych dynamic range as 1 man could do, but seems to have chilled out a bit more recently. Have a good one.

[@Neil-pv8pw]

@ Pete Townsend once said and totally what he means because when I was a kid, I was trying to work out what court he was playing. And he said if you play a power cord at high volume a third note is produced giving you a triad and this is done through overtones through analog amplifiers, but with modeling amps this is lost, but in London in the 70s was loads of rock bars, which were old musical halls which were pre-television today they are Witherspoon pubs, but I miss the small grassroots venues. It’s much more fun watching young people trying to create something innovative than watching highly polished bands with backing tracks and mining. I haven’t been to a gig in years and it’s sad because I really miss the gigs, but the stadium venues are awful the festival venues are awful and the jazz venues are just full of pretentious idiots today we have music colleges pumping out same old same old repetitive junk. There’s no humor. There’s no fun. It’s all serious about being in pain and wanting to die I

[@michavandam]

Tori Amos has a lot of metre variations, as do Soundgarden.

[@lamontprospect9974]

I've only been playing a couple of years and he lost me after the first few minutes.

[@christopher9152]

Keep playing. You'll get there!

[@lamontprospect9974]

@christopher9152 Thank you my friend. It's a good lesson. If you can make those extensions, it will make your playing less repetitive. 🙏❤️🙋

[@65Lynchy]

RL Burnside

[@gregbaugh7640]

gotta go with the flow…

[@petersmith-iz6im]

That Robert johnson stuff used to drive me crazy . Not that I can play like him, butI did finally 'get it', that I can jump all around ,shorten lengthen, and do all kinds of nonsense with 12 bar blues that just made me laugh out loud. I do it some times on folk pop songs to add misdirection, or i may add extra runs, walk downs, or what ever, for effect. This is because, when I teach my self a song, I often work the tune over really as much as I can stand to, before honing in onthe basic rythms, chords and melodies that work, yet i have a lot of leftover stuf i can put in, if i want. So when i just play very simple stuff, i hear different rythms and so on. But always, i have to be dead on the basic basic of the tune, or it just gets real sloppy, real fast.

[@emmanuelbortolin]

Technology.

[@TheGeniuschrist]

go listen to 'funny face' and tell me music used to be better.

[@marcottavi2655]

Beatles did it

[@eranzilber1]

man...Johnson was as hi as a kite... Don't bother counting him. It's just like framing him to a greed...😉

[@elementsofphysicalreality]

Popular music has ALWAYS been boring. And painfully simple. And if we’re branching out from popular music, there’s plenty of modern music with great substance, chord changes, and so on. Starting a video with this kind of rant automatically loses my respect and attention. It’s a shame because I was looking forward to learning about the OG.

[@robertdiggins7578]

I'm so disappointed in your comment that I stopped reading it and didn't give it my conceited attention, except for taking a bunch of my extremely valuable time to be really condescending and insulting, unaware that what I'm saying will not be helpful to anyone, ever. And I really wanted to know what you thought, know what I mean? Dang, I wonder why this happens to me so much 🤔

[@toxic-o1u]

All sounds the same because midi sequencing, autotune plus too much loudness in the recording

[@michavandam]

Someone please quantize and auto-tune this Robert Johnson guy!

[@thecrankedamps]

That version of let it be is over sang and awful

[@k.c.miller9965]

Totally agree that sticking to, or electronically changed so that music fits on the “lines” suck so bad I can’t listen to most new music. Recorded, or played with a recording “live”. It has its place but give me human music. Ps to me the let it be version you are using quite frankly,doesn’t serve the song for me and is the equivalent to a lead guitar playing as many notes as they can cram into a measure. Not a fan. Nowhere to go when you’re full bore the whole time.

[@henmat3000]

Old man shouting at the sky. Computers, quantization, and autotune are just new forms of musical expression. They’re not necessarily evil. Who says old musical expressions are lost? If you look beyond mainstream music, they’re still very much alive-not just in Western music, but everywhere. Plus, you even used old musical expressions in this video yourself. What is with all these rules? Music never had rules to begin with.

[@brokentiles]

Adele is quantized, though! More subtly than for teenybopper pop, but still... she's inherently fraudulent. So older suburbanites like pretending she's something unique... she's not! Her "off" notes both pitch and timing wise can be looked at and get too cringey too quickly.

[@markfuentez1543]

The SUBJECT is very important " The EXPRESSION " ...😊 But the video is SOOOOOOOOO boring and repetitive !!

[@cph2004]

Ive just recently watched the lady gaga documentary. Im not a fan and i dont listen to her music. im just interested in documentaries. She did a piano rendition of bad romance and it hits a lot more. A lot more emotion and expression kzbin.info/www/bejne/fIKxXqVodp2DnKssi=1h2XEQLq1tJkvsAD

[@Matt.Willoughby]

There's some pretty good music around at the moment, John Grant or First Aid Kit are doing good stuff and writing great songs. The actual chords being used has never stuck me as being important until it was mentioned here, chord progressions but never the actual chords, it makes sense though. Delta blues is simple but can be really deep, Mississippi John Hurt's music is simple like Robert Johnson's or Son Hoise, but those guys had a really rough life and had a lot of emotion to express through their music. John Prine or Blaze Foley were *amazing* song writers but 99% of people will never hear of them, yet 9 out of 10 people will be know who Taylor Swift. If 100,000 million people listen to Taylor Swift every day can it really be bad music? 🤔