Stevie Ray Vaughan's Cold Shot has this classic Texas Blues Shuffle going on. You can play it in any key once you've got it down.

The key of the recording is Ab because Stevie would play the song in the key of A but he would tune his guitar down a semi-tone so that the song was actually in Ab.

This would require a Db harmonica and chances are that you don't own one.

So I've lowered the key another semi-tone to G. Now we can use a C harmonica.

Right? For Blues in G, we need a C harmonica. The C harmonica will produce a G7 chord when drawing on holes -2-3-4-5.

Texas Shuffle

This shuffle requires swinging the eighth notes where the second half of the eighth note pair only gets about a third of the beat.

Because it gets short changed, sometimes we give it a kick in the ass. That's called accenting the off beat.

The melody notes land on the beat and the offbeat is sounded by raking the strings on the up stroke.

Harmonica

I like to start the song out with a little harmonica riff.

When we are on the I chord, a -4-5 chord sounds great.

I like to get solo ideas from the melody, riffs, rhythms or other solos of the song.

The melody to Cold Shot consists of notes in the Blues Scale.

If you've got your Blues Scale down, then you can take your harp to town

Once the rhythm is comfortable and you've got some ideas to try out on harmonica, ah man, it doesn't get any better.

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C Hohner Special 20

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You can find a downloadable version of the harmonica tabs under the Help Files tab above.

Have fun. Let me know how you make out. Leave a comment.

Peace. Stay in tune.

George