How to Play the 12 Bar Blues

Video Transcript

"Okay, let's, before we start playing, look at the twelve barre blues form on paper. You'll notice we have our repeat signs before anything else. These mean we're going to be playing it over and over and over again. This is the form and it doesn't change, it can only end on the one. So, notice every chord we have is dominant. We have a one-seven. Now we don't say what key we're in, it could be any key. There's not a certain key that you have to be in, so, if this is our one-seven chord, and our four-seven chord will be a fourth away. On the bass we can find that by just playing one string down without changing frets. Okay. These are dominant chords so we'll be doing the seven style arpeggios, the dominant seven arpeggio for each of them. There will be a certain line we'll use. So look, one-seven, optional four-seven, you can stay on one if you would like, one-seven, one-seven, two measures of four-seven, two measures of one-seven, one measure of five-seven, a fifth away, remember that will be one string up and two frets up. A four-seven, one-seven, and five-seven. So copy down this form, or memorize it, but at first you might want to have this form to look at. Okay. So here's the sound we'll be making with arpeggios. Say if one-seven is C seven, C, E, G, D flat, are the things we're outlining. We'll explore it further."