So we have our 1st chord, go ahead and strum it. You’ll get a little callus on your thumb, but really helps the tone and lets you hear the personality of this song. What Jon does is he just brushes the strings with his thumb on his picking hand. So if you are trying to do this with a pick, you’re going to get a different tone. The other thing you’ll notice is that Hubert plays with his fingers. The same chord, but played higher in pitch, giving a nice cutting sound. kind of like the open voicing where your middle finger is on the 4th string 2nd fret and your pointer on the 3rd string 1st fret, but up an octave, so it’s a much higher voicing. You basically have this 4 note chord, its an E. Then his middle finger is holding down the 13th fret 3rd string, and his ring finger is holding down the 14th fret 4th string. And the way that Hubert plays this is he goes way up the fret board to the 12th fret, barring his pointer finger across the 2nd and 1st strings. Starting up on the 5 chord, which would be an E7. It does sort of a traditional Intro where you start out on the turnaround, which is the last 4 bars of the tune.
This Howlin Wolf “Killing Floor” Lesson is basically just a 12 bar blues in the key of A.
