Learn the 12-Bar Blues Chord Progression

Video Transcript

"Let's look at the 12 bar blues as a written form. Over here you can see that, of course, the 12 bars signifies twelve measures. That will be the form. These signs here are repeat signs. That means, that once you play the form through once, just keep going, until you've decided on an ending. Now, our first measure will be using the one seven chord. Notice I also left a little 4/4 here meaning four beats per measure. That's the typical blues feeling. You might find the blues in 3/4, but we're not going to worry about that right now. It will be the same form just at a different time. So, on the one seven we have an option here (in the parenthesis) of changing to a four seven. I recommend it, especially starting off because it breaks things up, but some people will just rest on a one seventh for four measures. Anyway, one seven, four seven, back to one seven, another measure of one seven. Then we go to our four seven for real. Four seven no matter what. Two measures of four seven. Two measures back to one seven, then our five seven, our four seven, one seven and five seven. Now if you don't recall these roman numerals remember when we were trying to figure out our key signatures. If this is the one chord (say this is A) then the four seven will be D. Go back to the A seven, back to D seven. Our five seven here will be E7. Okay? Get used to this type of a form. You might want to write this out for yourself and try experimenting with which keys. You might need to use something such as this (a chart such as these that we saw before) to figure out if this is your one chord, your four chord is this and your five chord is this."