The Basics of the 12 Bar Blues for Beginners
So you wanna learn the blues huh! I’ve got the perfect beginner lesson for you today then. In this article and video (at the end of the article) I’ll show you how to understand the pattern of the 12 bar blues, how to know which chords fit into that pattern for each key and in the video give you some tips on the feel and way to play those chords. By the end of this article you’ll be playing a simple progression for yourself.
Determining which chords you’re going to play for a given 12 bar blues pattern isn’t tough. You need to know what key you want to play in and then you need to know the scale that corresponds to that key (i.e. Key of A you need the A major scale).
Once you have the scale you then pick out the first, fourth and fifth notes from the scale. These will correspond to the chords you’re going to be playing for that 12 bar blues progression.
Now that we know how to find the chords we can easily plug them into the 12 bar blues progression. The pattern always looks the same for the 12 bar blues:
1 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 4 – 4 – 1 – 1 – 5 – 4 – 1 – 5
No matter what key you’re playing in you always want to use the first, fourth and fifth notes/chords from that given scale. Each number corresponds to to one measure of that chord. If we assume then we’re playing in the key of A and each measure gets four beats then we’d start the progression with 4 beats of the first note in the key of A, followed by 8 beats of the fourth note in the key of A etc.
Carrying on with our Key of A example let’s complete it. The major scale for the key of A looks like this:
A – B – C# – D – E – F# – G# – A
We pick out the first note which is A, the fourth note which is D and the fifth note which is E. Finally we add those to the progression above which leaves us with:
A – A – A – A – D – D – A – A – E – D – A – E
So the final thing is where on the neck do we play these chords and what type of feel do we give our strumming to get a bluesy sound. The video lesson below will explain that and give you something you can practice after watching. So take a few minutes right now, watch that video and then go grab your own guitar and give it a try.
Are you interested in learning to become a better guitar player? Why not consider a guitar instructional dvd to sharpen your skills? DVD and video guitar lessons are the qucikest methods to improve your skills when studying on your own.
