You might record yourself to make sure you aren’t skipping any! You should be able to do this by yourself with a metronome and never miss a chord. In the blues form exercises we’ll outline each chord with its root note. In the beginning you may have to really concentrate on the changes. You can’t ever get lost wondering to yourself, “What chord is next?” With enough time and practice, you'll just hear and feel what the next chord change is. You need to memorize and completely internalize this sequence of chords. The first step in learning to play the blues is getting comfortable with where the chords change. There are 12 major keys you can play the blues in any one of them. Blues in C would plug in the chords C, F, and G into the 12-bar blues structure.

So, the basic 12-bar sequence looks like this:įor the blues in any other key, we’d do the exact same thing. The first 4 bars just use the I chord - I, I, I, I.Īnd the last 4 bars go V, IV, I, V. It is most easily thought of as three 4-bar sections the first 4, the middle 4, and the last 4 bars. In whatever key you are in, 12-bar blues uses the same basic sequence of I, IV, and V chords. A blues song might play through it 20 times. In a blues song this 12-bar cycle gets repeated over and over through the course of the tune.

Most often in blues you will count 4 beats to each bar 4/4 time. You should remember a bar is the same as a measure. That is, a repeated twelve-bar chord progression. The most common form of the blues is a 12-bar pattern of chord changes. Later in the lessons we’ll look at the many other variations. First I’m going to teach you the most common form that confuses students the least. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the I, IV, and V chords, make sure you go through that lesson before continuing. The blues uses the I, IV, and V chords throughout the song form. The blues form is a specific song structure used in the blues as well as other styles inspired by the blues like rock, jazz, R&B, etc. As I mentioned in about the blues, a song form is a structure, or a kind of formula, for a piece of music.

B flat blues chord progression