Rock & pop · blues rock · 4/4 shuffle

Texas shuffle

120 bpm
Play it over changesother tunes, key, solo piano or guitar, loop, mixer
triplets

The Texas shuffle — the driving blues-rock shuffle of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble (Pride and Joy), the Fabulous Thunderbirds and ZZ Top's boogies. Key of E, because the open low strings are the engine.

How it sits: the guitar plays the boogie on the two lowest strings — root and fifth, root and sixth, alternating every beat — with each beat split long-short on the shuffle (first and third triplet partials), all downstrokes. In bar 2 the same shape moves to A on the fifth string. The ride cymbal plays the same long-short shuffle, the snare cracks 2 and 4 with a ghosted pickup just before each backbeat, and the bass walks up the chord (1–3–5–6) in quarters.

Listen for the guitar and ride agreeing exactly on the short note; if they disagree on the swing, the shuffle wobbles.

Practice: palm-mute the riff lightly and play it against the ride alone; then let it ring.

Sources

  • standard practice; no transcribed source