Learn Stevie Ray Vaughan's style: one hand, two jobs

1. Where it comes from

Everything started with his brother: "Jimmie would leave his guitars around the house and tell me not to touch 'em. And that's basically how I got started" — and Jimmie brought the records home, "B.B. and Albert King, Albert Collins and guys like Hubert Sumlin, Buddy Guy — all of 'em".^{[GW2] [RRG]} The first record he owned himself was Lonnie Mack's "Wham!": "I started out trying to copy licks from Lonnie Mack records", "I got a lot of the fast things I do from Lonnie Mack — just the ideas and the phrasing", and he credited Mack with his tremolo picking and his vibrato.^{[W1] [GP1] [W6]} Albert King gave him the bends — King let "little Stevie" sit in at Texas clubs, called him his godson, and on their 1983 television session told him "there's a lot of guitar players out here that just play fast, they don't concentrate on soul — but you got 'em both".^{[W8] [GD1] [GW3]} Hendrix gave him the thumb over the neck, the 7♯9, the double stops with hammer-ons, the wah and the upside-down bar ("I loved Jimi a lot. He was so much more than just a blues guitarist"); Otis Rush the band's name and the bar on top; Buddy Guy "Mary Had a Little Lamb"; Lightnin' Hopkins the boogie "Rude Mood" runs on; T-Bone Walker the 9ths and 13ths; Chuck Berry "Love Struck Baby"; and on the jazz side Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery ("Riviera Paradise" is in Wes's octaves) and Django, of whom he said "Django and Jimi were doing the same thing in a lot of ways".^{[GW2] [VG1] [VG2] [GP2]} He had no theory ("I took music theory for one year in high school and flunked all but one six-week period"; "I just look for things that sound right") and a Texas tradition under him in which "the whole style begins with how you interpret a shuffle long before you ever solo over one".^{[GW2] [GP1] [TF1]}

The players

2. The hands: the setup, the pick, the muting

The setup. A Stratocaster ("Number One": a 1963 body, a 1962 rosewood neck, pickups dated 1959) with jumbo frets and a left-handed tremolo so the arm comes out on top, as Otis Rush and Hendrix had it, the springs so tight "I couldn't move it with my little finger anyway"; strings as heavy as .013, .015, .019, .028, .038, .058 ("depending on what shape my fingers are in"); everything tuned a half step down, which "gives you different overtones" and was "a lot easier to sing to"; two blackface Fenders with a Tube Screamer in front, "I use the Fenders for distortion and the Marshall for clarity". "Now, I use heavy strings, tune low, play hard, and floor it."^{[W2] [GP1] [GP2] [GW3] [GC1]} What this means for a player with lighter strings: the fingering is the same, a half step higher in pitch; the heavier the strings the more the bends and the vibrato cost, and the less the strings move when they are hit — "you can hit 'em hard and they don't move".^[W2]

The pick, from the arm. A Fender medium held by its rounded shoulder, "the rounded end allowed for more string attack than the tip"; the stroke from the arm rather than the wrist — "he didn't really pick from his wrist, he picked with his entire arm" (Kirk Hammett), "he doesn't pick the strings with his hand; he uses his whole arm to strike"; on the shuffle, "strum from the elbow and let your fret hand do all the muting work; stay loose and put your whole body into it".^{[W2] [GW4] [HB1] [GW6]} Under the pick the fingers fan out, and on the ballads and the fast instrumentals they take notes of their own — hybrid picking, "a relaxed grip it may be, but be sure to really dig in and mean every note you play".^[GW1]

Both hands muting. The trick that makes a wide strum sound one note: "he stopped the strings that he did not want to sound (both in rhythm and in solo section)", so the right hand could hit everything — "all the strings are being hit, but it's only the G string that produces a pitch". The left hand's spare fingers lie across the strings; the bass line is fretted "with the sides or paws of the fingers" so the idle strings are dead; the thumb over the neck chokes the low E; the ring finger's underside dampens its neighbors. The right hand adds the heel on the bass strings for the palm mute and lifts it for the stab.^{[DP1] [GW6] [DS1] [GC4]} The chunk — the top three strings struck dead on an upstroke, the swung "and" of every beat — is where the shuffle keeps its time; the exercises start there.

The grips

The hand shapes the feels are built on, grouped under a core shape with its variations beside it, each with its fingering — T is the thumb over the top of the neck, x a string left dead — and, where the shape is not obvious, a line saying where the other fingers go: the thumb chords with the A string under the thumb's pad, the 13th with its dead A string under the index, the maj13 with the pinky laid flat. Every one is in the Chord finder, tagged SRV. Each says whether the sources describe the fingering or it is the usual way.

The changes, with the grips

The changes each feel runs on, played with these grips and nothing else — the bass line and the chunk, the comp grips slid in, the thumb chords and the riff, the stabs — so the hand learns the changes before the lines between them. Open in drills puts the same changes on the Drills tab with the part's own strumming and the hand's positions; Neck draws each grip as it's fretted and lights it as it sounds; Fingering puts a diagram over each change of grip.

3. The scales: where the notes live, and the riffs made from them

The box under the hand. "Pentatonics are at the core of Stevie's scale-based playing", played with the thumb "rested on top of the neck as an anchor point" and "primarily the first, second and third fingers"; he "relied almost exclusively on the minor pentatonic scale for constructing licks and solos, occasionally mixing in the major pentatonic".^{[GW1] [HB1]} The shuffle's box is the E minor pentatonic in the open position — the bass line's strings and the fills' strings are one shape — and the fast lines climb into "the box at the 12th"; the blue note, the ♭5, is slid through in both. Every scale on this page is followed by a riff made from it, because the scale is a place to play from, not a thing to run.

Each drawn in the fingered key of the feel it belongs to. The ringed notes are the roots; a dimmed note is in the scale but not in the chord it's played over; a hollow note is a color or a blue note.

Each box below is drawn, then played as a drill over its band in the feel it belongs to, then played as a riff written from it note by note — the same box, the scale's notes in a phrase with the devices the sources name for it, home on the root — so the scale is learned as music and not as a ladder. Neck shows where each note is as it sounds; Open in drills puts the same scale and box on the Drills tab. The drills and the riffs are fixed: the same notes every time.

The shuffle box, in the open position

The blues box at the 12th

The Albert King box

Albert King's box. The second minor-pentatonic shape on the top three strings, above the root: in G, B♭ and C on the top string at the 6th and 8th frets, F and G on the B string, C and D on the G string. King "let bends sustain for their full length" and "didn't go straight to the target note"; the ♭7 is bent a tone to the root, the ♭3 to the 4th and, two whole steps, to the 5th, the 4th to the 5th; "bend stacking" pushes the 6th, 7th and 8th frets of the top string in turn, and "Texas Flood" does it "around the 3:15 mark".^{[HB2] [HB3] [PG2]}

The bends, the curl, the vibrato. "Concentrate on keeping the string bends in tune with a vocal-like delivery"; the first finger bends as well as the third, with "a certain loose frailty to the slightly shakily performed bend"; a quarter-tone bend finds "the crack between the starting note and the very next note", and he would add one "to notes he'd already bent up by one or even two steps"; the multi-string "trainwreck" bends of "Texas Flood" get "those extra strings into the bending motion" so that two strings rise together and screech on purpose; the oblique bend holds the top string with the fourth finger while the second or third string bends.^{[GW1] [GW4] [PG2] [TXBA3]} The vibrato is "wide and muscular", "a whole-arm motion pivoting at the wrist", added only after the bend arrives; on a chord it is the bar, rocked slowly.^{[GW4] [GW1] [W12]} The mordent — the root, the semitone above it for a moment, the root again — is "an SRV identifier" on "Texas Flood".^[VG1] In the app a bend of ¼ is the curl, b1 a tone, b1½ a step and a half, b2 two whole steps; a double stop with both numbers bent is the two-string bend; bar~ over a chord is the arm.

The strut box, and the hand moving

The Lenny box

The Riviera box

4. Exercises

In the order the course takes them: the chunk alone, the bass line with it, the sliding 6ths, the turnaround, the riff from the shuffle box, the fast boogie, the open-string run, the comp grips, the bends in the King box, the stacked and two-string bends, the thumb chord, the strut's double stops, the low riff and the stabs, the sixteenth scratch, the 5–6 comp, the Berry double stops, the maj13 under the bar, harmonics and the hybrid-picked arpeggio, the ornament line, the octaves, the ii–V comp. Each says the tempo to start at; the course's tempo ladders take the ones that need it up a rung at a time. Leave the fills to me on any card plays the band and the figure bars and leaves the fill bars to you.

5. The feels: rhythm, lead, and both at once

Lead parts in each feel, written against the chord they sit on so they follow the changes: the open box, the Lonnie Mack runs, the Albert King box, the strut's double stops, the horn answers, the rock and roll box, the Lenny box with its ornament, the Riviera box in octaves. The blues parts play the minor pentatonic over the major chords — the ♭3 against the chord's 3rd on purpose — and the ballad and the vamp stay in their own colors.

The point of the whole page: the parts that carry lead lines as well as a figure, heard with the blend on Mixed — rhythm in the figure bars, a lead line in about half the fill bars, the way the only guitarist in a trio plays. Leave the fills to me on any of these plays the band and the figure bars and goes quiet in the fill bars, which are yours; the course's improvising pieces say what to try in them.

Each feel below: what the sources say it is, then its cards — the rhythm part, the lead part, and the mixed part that carries both — each the engine playing a part of the SRV library over its band, drawn as tab with the rhythm under it and the grip named over each bar. Play loops it; the tempo, the loop and the fills-to-me switch are on every card; Open in jam opens the Jam tab with the same key, feel, part and roll.

The Texas shuffle

One hand, two jobs. "Pride and Joy" is "a walking bass line on the lower strings and rhythmic stabs on his treble strings": the bass line — root, 3rd, 5th, 6th, the ♭7 on the way back — on the beats, the top three strings struck muted on every swung "and" as an upstroke, "each note played on the downbeat, with muted strokes on the offbeat", the picking hand keeping "a constant swing rhythm" whether the strings ring or not.^{[HB1] [GW1] [GW1b]} Keith Wyatt's lesson has the order to learn it in: the bass part first, "one note on each downbeat", then the chords "by strumming only upstrokes on the upbeats", then the two together — "bass notes on downbeats paired with chord upstrokes on the upbeats".^[GW6] The Texas shuffle underneath moves "root–5 to root–6 and then up to root–♭7"; the Vaughan brothers' variation goes "5–♭7 over the IV chord, then come back".^[TF1] The two-note chords that slide in between the bass notes are found "relative to the root note of the key, so you can use them in any key".^[TXBA2]

Why E: the open strings. The shuffle sits in E because "the open strings make all (well, many) things possible": the chord is the top strings open, the bass line is the low E and the A string, and "finger shapes that allow the maximum number of strings to ring at a time (often the top E string)" get "maximum sonic variety" from the instrument. Premier Guitar's version alternates E and A6 and over-bars the A "to catch the F♯".^{[GW6] [W3] [PG1]} In the app, the shuffle and the funk blues are realized in the open position — the open strings and four frets — and the tab names each bar's grip.

The fast shuffle and the open strings

The fast side. "Rude Mood" at 264: "the bass notes are played quickly with muted notes in between, resulting in a swung feel", "contrapuntal riffing and percussive string scrapes, like a hyperactive Pride and Joy", "hints of rockabilly in the boogie-woogie bass lines", "a long string of eighth notes and its major-pentatonic melody", a "repeated-note fanfare" — after Lightnin' Hopkins, and with hybrid picking in its hardest bars.^{[W11] [VG1] [GC2]} "Scuttle Buttin'" is Lonnie Mack's "Chicken Pickin'" reworked — "just another way of playing Lonnie Mack's Chicken Feed" — "fast flourishes using pull-offs incorporating open strings", since "using the open strings makes the fast pull-offs slightly easier to articulate", the riff "probably bends, not slides" on the record and slides on the road to spare the hand.^{[SF1] [GW1] [GL3]}

The slow blues in 12/8

The slow blues: the comp. T-Bone Walker's harmony — "dominant 9th and 13th chords" and "that descending ninth chord thing that he did as an intro" — is the Texas comp: the 13th with the root on the low E and its A string dead under the index, the 9ths with the root on the A string and the ring finger across three strings, each slid in from a fret below, and the ♭II cadence heard on "Tell Me" as A♭9 to G9 slid down from above; "restraint is part of the vocabulary".^{[TF2] [AA1] [VG1]} "Texas Flood" opens on Fenton Robinson's chordal intro "given the SRV treatment", in 12/8 with the IV in bar two, and the comp behind his own singing is these grips and the bass walking the last beat.^{[VG1] [W5]}

The minor strut

Bass-and-chord style: the strut. "Cold Shot" is "bass-and-chord style" through a Vibratone — "menacing strut", "doublestops, dissonant two-string harmony licks" — with the chords as thumb chords: "his fretting hand thumb would play the root note on the 6th string" and the index across the top four strings, Am7 at the 5th fret and the same hand at the 10th for Dm7, the 7♯9 for the V; the riff alternates the root and the ♭7 on the D string in a shuffle with everything else dead, "you need to position your fingers so you dampen everything except the fourth string", the open strings sounding on the upstrokes between.^{[GC2] [JM2] [DS1]} The band cut it at four in the morning on its first complete run-through.^[GW9]

The thumb chord: where the fingers go. The thumb comes over the top of the neck and frets the low E with its pad; the pad rests on the A string and kills it, which is the point — five strings sound, not six. The index lies flat across the D, G, B and e strings at the same fret. That leaves the middle, ring and pinky free above the index: the riff on the D string is the middle finger (the ♭7 two frets below the octave under the index? no — the octave is the D string at the index's fret and the ♭7 two frets below it, so the index lifts for the ♭7 and the middle or the ring takes it), and the double stops on the B and e strings at the index's fret and three above it are the index and the pinky. Hendrix's thumb on the E-shape barre (the Hendrix course on this site) is the same thumb; here the shape is the m7 and the A string is deliberately dead. The wrist sits low to let the thumb reach; "just flip your fret hand over the top of the neck" is the showboat version.^{[JM2] [GW1]}

The funk blues in sixteenths

The funk blues in sixteenths. "Mary Had a Little Lamb" — Buddy Guy's record kept whole — is "a funky 16th-note boogaloo-style blues groove" with "low-register riffs and chord figures emulating horn parts", "constant switching of rhythm and lead", E7, A7, B7 and the 7♯9, the minor-2nd clash "against the root note", restraint and "the way we all hit that one note together"; "Testify" is the 7♯9 as a vamp with "Jimi's funky lead/rhythm riff style"; "Couldn't Stand the Weather" is "funky 16th-note strumming patterns" where "the main aspect to concentrate on is maintaining accuracy".^{[JM1] [VG1] [GC2] [GW1]}

Straight-eight rock and roll

Rock and roll in the trio. "Love Struck Baby" is "a driving rhythm guitar figure similar to Chuck Berry" — the 5th-to-6th comp in straight eighths — over a train-style beat, with "classic rock 'n' roll doublestops to beef up the sound" in a power trio, "boogie comping, bent triads, and inserted jazz passing chords (chromatic ascending 6/9 voicings)", and T-Bone's jump-blues lines.^{[W10] [GW1] [VG1]}

The chord-melody ballad

Lenny: the maj13 and the 6th chord. "Colorful enriched voicings of E major and A major, reinterpreting the I–IV of the blues as a vamp in a jazz vein": an Emaj13 of root, 3rd, major 7th, 3rd and 13th with "the 5th, 9th and 11th left out" — x-7-6-8-9-9, the pinky laid flat — against the 6th chord, "a movable major 6th chord to which Vaughan applies moderate vibrato with the tremolo bar", moved through B, D, G and B♭ in the bridge, "the same unusual thirds-related sequence as John Coltrane's Giant Steps"; between the chords "Hendrix-by-way-of-Mayfield doublestops", "whammy-bar shimmers, piercing harmonics", and solos from "the E major scale, E minor pentatonic scale, and E minor blues scale" with "characteristic F (not F♯) ornaments".^{[VG1] [VG2] [GW8] [GC3] [W12] [GC2]}

Hybrid picking: what is known. The sources describe the pick with the fingers fanned out behind it — "a hybrid pick-and-fingers approach", "hybrid pick-and-finger technique at the 5th fret on the first string" in a jazz-flavored line, "use your thumb and fingers for a chunky, full sound" on the double shuffle, hybrid picking in "Riviera Paradise" and in "Rude Mood", and an "upstroke rake" on the acoustic — and nothing read for this page describes him playing without a pick.^{[GW1] [GW1b] [TF3] [GC2] [JM3]} So the cards say hybrid picking on the ballad and the vamp, and a note marked m in the tab is one a free finger takes under the pick's bass note; every other card is the pick alone.

The soul-jazz vamp

Riviera: the ii–V and the octaves. Em9 to A13, "the emblematic ii–V pattern", bookends his jazz pieces; "brushed Wes Montgomery-esque octaves", "scraping pick behind nut with vibrato arm cadence", "astonishing note outpouring with raking strings and blurred fingers", recorded with the lights down after a full day's work and finished "seconds before tape ran out". The organ under it is Reese Wynans; "Stang's Swang" and "Chitlins con Carne" are the same side of him.^{[VG2] [GC2] [SF2]}

6. The songs, as reference points

What happens in each record, with its key as fingered, its form and the devices to listen for — and where to find a tab of it (Ultimate Guitar and Songsterr are linked; the tab is theirs, the analysis is here). The parts on this page draw on the way of playing in each; none copies its lines. Chord progressions are common stock — the US Copyright Office's practice and the Second Circuit in the Ed Sheeran case both leave them outside copyright^[LAW] — so the changes are given as they are, and are in the Jam tab's preset list under Stevie Ray Vaughan.

7. Studies

Whole forms to play through: the twelve bars each feel runs on, with a mixed part realized over them, its fills and lead lines rolled. Not the songs — the app's own writing over their forms. The last lesson of the course plays these with the fill bars left to you.

8. Improvising rhythm and lead: the method

Figure, question, answer. The way the only guitarist in a trio improvises is the way every mixed card on this page is built: a figure that is home — the bass line and the chunk, the thumb chord and its riff, the grip slid in on one, the 5–6 comp — played in the bars where the song needs a floor, and a fill bar, every second bar or so, that is a question the figure asks and the box under the hand answers. The answer is short — three or four notes of the box, one bend in them, a double stop, the rake into a note — and it lands: on the low root, on the chord's 3rd, on the grip again. The bass never stops for it; a fill is what happens over the bass line, not instead of it. Then the change is walked into, and the figure is home again. Practice it in this order: play the figure bars with the card and leave the fill bars empty (Leave the fills to me does exactly that); then put one thing in each empty bar; then two; then roll a new realization and play its fills back to the card, and roll again and play your own. Say the phrase before you play it. The last lesson of the course does this over every feel.

9. For teachers

What each lesson is for, what goes wrong first, and how to tell when it is learned. The lessons are the ones in Start here; each names its cards. Every fingering on this page says whether the sources describe it or it is the usual way (the tag under each grip), every claim about the records is cited, and the playing itself was never heard by the author (see How this was made), so treat the tab as an account of the idiom, not a transcription.

Common faults, and how to hear them

When it is learned

• A strum across all six strings sounds only the low E, and the chunk is dead on the swung "and", at 60 and at 100.
• The bass line and the chunk hold for twelve bars at 100 with the band without looking, on E, A7 and B7.
• The two-note chords slide in on the "and" in E and in A, both notes together, nothing between.
• The open box in swung eighths at 120, and the riff from it landing on the low root every time.
• The boogie with the dead notes clean at 160, and the open-string run at 140 with every pull-off as loud as the note before it.
• The 13th and the 9ths slid in on one at 62 with only their strings sounding, the bass walking the last beat.
• The ♭7 bent to the root, the ♭3 to the 4th and to the 5th, each in pitch before the wrist moves, in G and in A.
• The two-string bend rising as one, and the stacked bends up the top string in turn.
• The thumb chord sounding five strings and the riff sounding one at 100, the double stops between, on Am7, Dm7 and the 7♯9.
• The riff and the stab trading every bar at 100 with the stab on the "and" of two, and the scratch sixteen even strokes.
• The 5–6 comp in even eighths at 150 with the double stop bent a tone in pitch.
• The Emaj13 and the 6th chord under the bar with every string sounding, the harmonics ringing, and the arpeggio pick-and-fingers.
• The octaves two strings apart with nothing between, up and down the Riviera box, and the ii–V comp under the bar.
• Any study on this page played twice through with the band with the fill bars left to you, and something happening in every one of them.

10. How this was made

What was done, and what was not. This page, the SRV genre in the app and the course were written by Claude (an AI model — Claude Fable 5.1, working in Claude Code) at the owner's request, in September 2026. The research was reading: the sources in the list below were fetched and read as text — the Wikipedia articles on the man, his instruments, the records and the songs, the Guitar World interviews of 1984 and 1985 and its lessons (the 20 techniques, the Texas shuffle, Keith Wyatt's Pride and Joy shuffle, Kirk Hammett's lesson, the Lenny voicing), a Guitar Player interview, Wolf Marshall's two Fretprints analyses in Vintage Guitar, guitar.com, Premier Guitar, TrueFire, Happy Bluesman, Blackstar, Texas Blues Alley's lesson pages, Jon MacLennan's and Desi Serna's and Carl Brown's lesson pages, Andy Aledort's list from Jimmie Vaughan, Songfacts, the account of the Albert King session, and the legal sources on chord progressions. No recordings were listened to and no videos were watched: the tools used cannot play audio or video. The videos linked on this page and in the course are linked by their titles and what their pages say, so that a human explaining a technique on camera is one click away, and the course says on every such piece that the author has not watched them. Several pages could only be read through a text-extraction proxy after the site refused the tools (Guitar World, Guitar Player, Vintage Guitar), and the source list says so; the standard oral history (Paul and Aledort's Texas Flood) was not read and is named as a book to go to. The rest is the model's own knowledge of the music, checked against the sources where they overlap. The research is written down in full in docs/SRV-RESEARCH.md so that a change to a card never needs the reading done again.

The parts were then written the way every part in this app is written (docs/STYLES.md) and the way this course was planned and reviewed is written down for the next one (docs/COURSES.md): from the idiom — where the weight falls, which strings, which notes, how a phrase ends — never from a transcription, and with no signature riff reproduced; the boogie line, the shuffle, the 5–6 comp, the Berry double stop, the ii–V vamp, the 6th chord moved by thirds and the mordent as an ornament are the common property of the music. Each part is a figure with variants, fills that know whether the next bar changes, lead lines, and a beginner's version, in the interval notation the engine realizes into notes on the neck; the engine gained what these parts needed — the quarter-tone curl, both strings of a double stop bent, the bar's vibrato, the harmonic at the 12th fret, the upstroke rake, a note taken by a free finger, the thumb chord and the maj13, 6th, m9 and 13th grips as grips the engine knows, and a switch that sounds a page a half step down — and each is held by a test that was broken on purpose and seen to fail. Every card on this page was then realized and read, string by string, against this page's own text and the research, with a tool (tools/dive-check.js) that prints every bar and holds the rules — every bar has notes, every note sits in the hand's position or says it reaches, treble material over a low-E root lands on the treble strings, a named grip came as itself — and a test that loads the page and holds the same over three seeds. The tabs are realizations of those parts, rolled from a fixed seed so the page reads the same each time; the sound is the app's own recorded guitar and synthesized band. Tempos are approximate; keys are as fingered. Where the page says "as heard in", it means the way of playing on that record, not its notes.

11. Sources

Lettered and numbered as cited above and in docs/SRV-RESEARCH.md. "Read" means the page was fetched and read as text; "summary" means only a search engine's summary could be read; "through a reader proxy" means the page refused the tools directly and was read through a text-extraction service.