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Easy 12 Bar Blues Progression Tutorial
Learning to play the 12 bar blues is fun. Some beginners may feel that learning blues guitar is some what daunting but that isn’t the case. There are only 3 main components to learning the 12 bar blues: what chords, what order and how to play the chords. In this article I’m going to walk your through all three. At the end of this article there’s a video lesson that supports the material you’ll read here, I suggest you watch the video as well.
So how do you determine what chords you should be playing for a 12 bar blues progression. Well it depends what key you want to play in. You start with the scale of the key you want to play in. Let’s say you want to play in the Key of A. So you’d look at the A major scale and from that you’d pick out the first, fourth and fifth notes from that scale. These correspond to the chords you’re going to play for the 12 bar blues in the key of A.
Let’s continue with the idea of the key of A. You’ve got the first, fourth and fifth notes from the scale. We’re going to now plug those into the 12 bar blues pattern which looks like this:
1 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 4 – 4 – 1 – 1 – 5 – 4 – 1 – 5
The numbers of course correspond to the notes you would have determined already. Each number stands for one measure in the progression. So if we assume we’re playing 4 beats per measure then each number would be 4 beats of that particular note, or chord.
So let’s look at a short example using what we’ve learned so far. We’ll stick with the Key of A. First we need to review the A major scale:
A – B – C# – D – E – F# – G# – A
Next we pick out the first, fourth and fifth notes from that scale. For the key of A it would be A, D and E.
Finally we place these notes into the 12 bar blues progression above which gives us this:
A – A – A – A – D – D – A – A – E – D – A – E
That’s all there is to the theory behind the 12 bar blues. Of course you need to learn what type of chords to play and what feel to give your strumming. This is best left to the video I’ve recorded that’s below. Take a few minutes to watch that video now and you should be able to go grab your guitar and play a basic 12 bar blues in the Key of A.
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.
February 26, 2010 at 8:03 pm | Learn Guitar Chords | 8 comments
Absolutely – the blues is where it begins
The Blues is so simplistic, yet can convey deep emotion and sense of history and time. I love the 12 bar blues pattern. It gives you a chance to express yourself, and it never sounds boring to my ears.
seems simple enough, I love the blues, thanks for the lessons.
I love the blues, it somehow makes me happier. if I’m depressed or something, I’d just put some Davy knowles or joe bonamassa on.
You made it very simple, i love blues and i like the theory behind it! i’ll try it, thanx.
I was wondering if you could share some simple (well known) songs that follow this progression you demonstrated?
It’s not hard to teach one on one but students tend to get away from the “feel” on their own and bog down. Direct imitation with immediate feedback from me seems to work really well but all the abstract instruction on the web seems to make students over analyze it and forget that sympathetic motion is ultimately a feeling. Teaching it is much like teaching someone to roll their Rs – the technical information can actually get in the way of “getting it”.
stagedive
I love the Acoustic blues