By Guest Blogger Ian Fraser.
The 12 bar blues can be as simple or complex as a guitar player wants it to be. In this article we’re going to keep things simple and start it out for beginners. You’ll learn how to know what chords belong in a 12 bar blues progression in a give key, what order to play those chords in and how to get the right feel when playing a 12 bar blues progression. After reading this article you’ll have the basics to improve your blues knowledge even further.
Playing a 12 bar blues progression in a particular key isn’t difficult once you know the basic pattern, but first you have to know what notes to play in that pattern. The first step is determining what key you want to play in, this will give you a starting point. If you want to play in the Key of A then you’d refer to the A major scale for which notes you need to play. The second step is picking out the first, fourth and fifth notes from that A major scale. These will be the notes you’re going to play for your 12 bar blues in the Key of A.
Now that we understand where we get the notes from how do we play them? What pattern do we use? The 12 bar blues is just that a 12 measure/bar easy to follow & learn pattern that always looks like this:
1 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 4 – 4 – 1 – 1 – 5 – 4 – 1 – 5
No matter what key you’re playing in the 12 bar blues always follows this same pattern. This is why I first talked about finding the first, fourth and fifth notes from a given scale. You can now just plug in those notes as chords in the above pattern.
Now we’ll go through a complete example in the Key of G. We start looking at the major scale for G.
G – A – B – C – D – E – F# – G
From the scale we can then pick out the first, fourth and fifth notes which are G, C and D respectively.
Next we place those in the 12 bar blues pattern I showed you above to give us the progression below.
G – G – G – G – C – C – G – G – D – G – C – D
Finally now we need to learn exactly how to play this on the guitar. The theory part is a must so that you’ll know how to formulate a 12 bar blues progression for a particular key, but the actual feel and playing part is tough to describe in text.
I’ve recorded a short 10 minute video lesson below on the 12 bar blues. Give it a watch and you’ll understand even better how to get started with this. After you watch the video go grab your own guitar and give it a try. Practice makes perfect.
Interested in more beginner guitar techniques and concepts? Why not try a guitar instructional dvd to further your education at home? Video guitar lessons are quickly becoming the self study method of choice for many beginner guitar players.
Other Related posts:
Loading ...
