3 Steps to Master the 12 Bar Blues on Guitar

Learning to play the 12 Bar blues on guitar isn’t tough. Some beginners feel the blues is for advanced guitar players but that isn’t the case. In this beginner lesson I’ll share with you the 3 steps you need to learn to know which chords belong in a 12 bar blues progression in a given key, what pattern to play those chords in and in the video at the end of this article I’ll show you some techniques on how to play those chords in a bluesy feel.

So what notes do we need to play in a 12 bar blues progression. There’s a logical pattern you can learn so that you’ll be able to determine what notes you must play in any particular Key for the 12 bar blues. To determine this you must first know or find the given scale for that key and then pick out the first, fourth and fifth notes from that scale.

How do you piece these chords together once you have them? This is where the pattern of the 12 bar blues comes in. What is it that makes it the 12 bar blues? A couple of things, first it’s 12 measures long and second it follows this pattern no matter what key you’re playing in.

1 – 1 – 1 – 1 - 4 – 4 – 1 – 1 – 5 – 4 – 1 – 5

Remember just a moment ago when I talked about picking out the first, fourth and fifth notes from a given scale? Well this is where we’re now going to plug them in. The numbers in the above pattern correspond to the notes I wanted to you to get above.

Let’s look at a quick example in the Key of A. The A major scale looks like this:

A – B – C# - D – E – F# - G# - A

Where the first, fourth and fifth notes are A, D and E respectively. If we plug those into the 12 bar blues pattern above we get:

A – A – A – A – D – D – A – A – E – D – A – E

So now what form of these chords do you play and in what feel & style? That’s best left up to the video lesson below. I will walk you through a couple of examples and places you can play this 12 bar blues in the key of A progression on the neck.

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