An Intro to the Blues- the 12-bar blues
Jun 24th, 2007 by admin
Many of you are already familiar with the 12-bar blues, but since I plan on doing more advanced blues and jazz lessons in the future I wanted to start of with the basics to make sure everyone is up to par (or should I say “up to bar”:)) on the 12-bar blues. I am not really going to go into the history of the blues. You can always go to Wikepedia for that. I want to dive straight into how to play the blues.
The 12- bar blues format
As the name indicates, the 12-bar blues is a blues format with 12 bars in 4/4 time. (4/4 time means that there are 4 beats per measure. So if you are practicing with your metronome, every 4 beeps is one bar). The 12 bars are made up of 3 different chords: the I, IV and V. (See my post on diatonic harmony if you don’t know what those roman numerals mean). Many times the I, IV, V chords are played as dominant chords so the symbols may look like I7, IV7, V7. Using dominant chords will create more tension and sadness, which is what the blues are all about.
In the 12 bar blues those chords are almost always arranged in the same format. Here is what a standard 12 bar blues chord format would look like. The red Roman numerals indicate the name of the chord that should be played for that bar (I wrote in what the chords would be if we were in the key of E. You can change the chords to match whatever key you want to play in). I also wrote the bar number in blue under each bar:
So those are the basics to the 12-bar blues. Now you can write your first blues song. I’ll get you started: “Well since my baby left me…” Take it away!
Stay tuned for lots more blues lessons to come!
Another solid intro post. Thanks! (Although I much prefer “I woke up this morning . . . ” as the opening line).
Worth mentioning that this is actually the “quick change” variant of the 12 bar blues. The “standard” 12 bar blues is I I I I IV IV I I V IV I I.
But lean them both, and the Jazz variant
Bruce,
Thanks for making a good point. I should have stated that in the post. Thanks for stopping by!
[…] è un pò scarna. Sembra che manchi qualcosa. Per ovviare a questa monotonia, come suggerisce The Guitar Resource, possiamo utilizzare gli accordi in settima, o accordi dominanti, per creare maggiore enfasi, e […]