Tush Guitar Lesson – ZZ Top

About this lesson

With our guitar tutorial on Tush, you will learn these guitar skills: 12 bar blues, Blues shuffle rhythm, Palm muting, Power chords, String muting.

You have great taste for learning Tush, good for you 🙂 This classic blues-rock song should be made compulsory for all guitar players, there's just so much to learn from this song.

It's basically a 12 bar blues song in the key of G, played the ZZ Top way.

There are lots of things going on in the song, and our Tush guitar lesson will teach you how to play the entire song. Except for the solo. Maybe I'll do another lesson on that sometime.

We'll start the tutorial by reviewing the chords that are used for 12 bar blues in the key of G. If you need to do so, please go ahead and review the 12 bar blues form.

Next, we'll start learning the intro/main riff to Tush. It's a bit tricky:

• It starts off with a slide
• Then you'll be plucking just the inner strings
• Muting the rest (in case you do pluck them)
• And adding ghost strums in between.

Quite a handful, but I'll show you every detail.

After the main riff, we'll start learning the riffs Billy Gibbons plays during the verse. By the way, Billy Gibbons was named the 32nd greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stones Magazine. Just FYI.

• The G riff is very similar to the main riff. It's basically the 1st half of the main riff played 4 times (4 bars).
• The C and D riffs are classic blues boogie woogie patterns. I'll show you 2 ways to play them.
• There are 2 walk-ups, 1 from the G to C, then another from the C to G.

And what would a 12 bar blues song be without a turnaround? We'll of course learn to play the turnaround to Tush as well.

At the end of the lesson, I'll also teach you how to play rhythm guitar during the solo section of the song. If you want to learn to play the solo to Tush, have a look at the downloadable tabs. It's basically the G minor pentatonic, fairly simple stuff.

Tush song details

Tush was released in 1975 on ZZ Top's 4th album, Fandango. It was released as a single as well.

The title, Tush, has a double meaning in the song. It refers to buttocks, as well as lavish.

Tush charts and rankings

• VH1 named Tush the 67th best hard rock song of all time. It's not really hard rock though... go figure 🙂
• US billboard 100 (1975): 19

Skills you'll learn