You’ve probably heard the terminology 12 bar blues before if you’ve been reading about guitar or playing for a while. It’s the primer you want to learn before you move into blues specific style guitar lessons and that is what this article is going to focus on. I’ll share with you what chords to play in each key and in what pattern to play those chords to make it a 12 bar blues progression.
The 12 bar blues is a pattern of notes. The notes that make up that pattern are taken from a particular scale, possibly the A, G or E major scales (there are other scales besides major scales you can use but for this example we’ll only consider major scales).
To know which notes to take from a scale for the 12 bar blues we must refer to the numbers of the notes in a scale. Where are the numbers in a scale? Well they start at one on the first note and go from left to right counting up one for each note.
So if we look at an example with the G major scale which looks like this: G – A – B – C – D – E – F# – G
G is #1, A is #2, B is #3, C is #4 and so on.
Understanding the numbers that correspond to notes in a major scale we can now plug them into the 12 bar blues pattern that looks like this: 1 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 4 – 4 – 1 – 1 – 5 – 4 – 1 – 5.
So if we were playing the 12 bar blues in the Key of G we’d be playing the notes G, C and D in the pattern above.
How do we strum these notes? What type of guitar chords do you play? Well that part is a little more difficult to explain in an article so I’ve recorded a short video lesson to go along with this article. Watch it below as I give you further examples of how to piece together a 12 bar blues progression and also show you a couple of ways to play it on the neck.
Ready to get serious about learning to play the guitar? Why not take matters into your own hands and try guitar dvd lessons so you can study on your own. Video lessons provide you with the one-on-one approach of private instruction but the freedom of self study.
