How to play a 12 Bar Blues Guitar Progression

Video Transcript

"RICK TOBEY: I'm Rick Tobey and in this series, we will be learning how to play blues progressions and a blues song on behalf of Expert Village. Now, blues progressions are generally either a 12-bar--what they call a 12-bar blues or 16-bar blues. A bar is a measure and a measure is a group of notes. In this case, it would be--or actually a group of beats. It would be four beats to a measure, so each group of four beats is considered a bar. So, a 12-bar blues would sound something like this--and I will attempt to count the bars as we go, starting with bar 1. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, two, three, four, 6, two, three, four, 7, two, three, four, 8, two, three, four, 9, two, three, four, 10, two, three, four, 11, two, three, four, 12, two, three, back to 1. So, you'll see how that whole progression lasted what we call 12 bars, so that was an example of a 12-bar blues. And in the next section, I will demonstrate the song "Little Red Rooster" which is a 12-bar blues song and I'll throw in a couple of little extra embellishments that we'll also learn."