You can watch the video for ideas.īut when you get to the turnaround, what do you do? You can watch the video to see mine, or experiment with some of your own. Feel free to use it sparingly, it functions very well as accent notes. As you play the steady rhythm in your left hand, experiment with different patterns of the right hand pattern I just taught you. Now for variety, just move your fingers one key over and play the E and the G. For the G chord play the third and flatted seventh together, that a D and an F. We are going to create a simple little right hand pattern using the third and the flatted seventh. The blues gets its sound from the use of the flatted third or the flatted seventh (or both). If you have gotten the left hand rhythm down, let's put our right hand to work! We could just play the chords with our right hand, but that isn't going to sound very bluesy. See if you can work out what those notes are for the C and D chords yourself. Just remember that you are playing the root note and alternating between the fifth and the sixth notes. After you play that pattern four times, it's time to move it to the C chord. If you can't quite get the feeling or the rhythm, watch the video and listen to me play. To really get that bluesy sound, try this combination of quarter notes: What you want to do is alternate between those two sets of notes. The next part of the pattern is to strike the G key and the E key together. With your left hand find the G key and the D key and strike them both together. There are all sorts of turnarounds in blues music, but we'll talk about those a little later.įor now, let's put our blues progression to work! I'm going to show you a simple pattern that you'll hear in a lot of blues and early rock music. Generally at the end of the song, instead of ending on the five chord, you'll end on the root to give the song a sense of “closure”. It's just a little filler to get you back to the five chord, at which point the progression repeats. The last bar of the 12 bar blues is called a turnaround. Looking at the progression, you'll see that you play the G chord for four bars, the C chord for the next two, back to the G chord for two, then one bar each of the D, C and G.

The basic structure of the 12 bar blues is 3 lines of 4 bars each. We will be playing it in the key of G, so our chords are G, C and D. Gee, I wonder where it got its name? The chord progression is easy for beginners because it only uses three chords, the root, the fourth, and the fifth. The 12 bar blues is a chord progression used in blues and rock music that lasts for 12 bars. Today I want to talk to you about the 12 bar blues. Download PDF Learn How To Play The 12 Bar Blues On The Piano!

Between the bars piano chords