Simple Shape & Chord Pattern to Play Over Any Blues Song!

So hopefully you just finished watching my video on how to play power chords in your hair to learn how to apply those to 12 bar blues. And this way you can play with any blues song that you want. If you didn't catch that video, I'll put a link up there. You can go check it out. Because we're gonna jump right into what is a 12 bar blues progression. And how does it unlock playing over any single blues song that you want?

So all that 12 bars blues means is we're playing 12 measures of music in a very, very specific order. Now, a measure of music is four beats. One, two, three, four. Okay. And usually we would play a shuffle pattern, which I'll show you in a little bit. But all we're doing is we're doing that 12 times. And let's talk about the key of A. Okay. I always like to use keys here. If you don't know what a key is, don't worry. We're not going to get into a lot of music theory here. Just know it's just chords. It's a family of chords that' sound good together. And I'm going to give you all the chords. So don't worry about it. If you want a little cheat sheet, you can go onto my Patreon and get a cheat sheet for 12 bar blues. But what we're going to do is we're going to start in the key of A. And the chords we're going to be using are A, D and E. And these are very important chords. They're called the I chord, the four chord and the five chord. And 12 bars blues traditional form for 12 bars blues is you're going to play the first chord, the first chord, the first chord,. So four measures of a in this particular case. Then we're going to play two measures of the IV chord, which would be D. And then we go back to two measures of the A chord. Okay? So so far we've got four measures of the I chord, two measures of the IV chord, and then two measures of the I chord. And the last four bars we're going to play the V chord with which in the key of A would be our E chord. Okay. Then we're going to jump back to the IV chord, which is D. And then we're going to play two more measures of our A chord. Okay? And that's the entire 12 bar blues form. And you just play it over and over and over again. All right, And I'll show you a couple other examples after this. But first let's give it a try with the A chord. Now we're going to be doing a shuffle pattern. The only difference between, you know, Chuck Berry and real blues is that we're going to use a shuffle pattern. We're rock and roll. Chuck Berry, you know, does stuff like.

Very straight eighth note pattern. We're going to be doing more of a shuffle blues. So it's going to be, we're going to find our A power chord first which is going to be the fifth fret on the top string. Okay? So we have an A power chord and we're just going to.

A 1, a 2, a 3, a 4, a 1, a 2, a three, a four.

Okay. That's all we're doing for the rhythm. It's a shuffle 1, a 2, a 3, a 4. It's not rock and roll. Cause rock and roll is straight eighth notes.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Blues is a shuffle one.

Okay? It's a shuffle rhythm. Okay? So that's what we're going to be doing on this exercise. So we would play four measures of that, A power chord. And to get to our four chord, all we're going to do is move our fingers down one string each. So now we're on the fifth fret of the A string and the seventh fret of the D string. Okay, that is going to be our D chord and and then our five chord. We're going to move everything up two frets. So now we're on the seventh fret of the A string and the ninth fret of the D string. So you can see it's a little pattern. We're going A.

D, E. Okay.

It's just a little pattern. So if we just use our first finger, we have fifth fret, fifth fret on the A string, seventh fret, five, five, seven. Okay, that's our little patterns. And then you just add the third finger to the mix for your power chords. Alright, so let's play through this 12 bar blues pattern. We're going to do four measures of a. So we've got one, a two, a three, a four, a one, a two, a three,.

Okay. After we play four measures, we got two measures of.

Then we're going back to A.

Okay, this is that last four measures. So now we have to kind of jump up to that V chord. Okay, so we've got one measure of the five.

Now we're going to the IV chord. So we're just going to slide back two frets.

Then We've got two measures of A.

And once you get to the end, you would do that all over again. So let's try it all the way through. I'm going to play without stopping. Ok, so we're going to do four measures of A, two measures of D, two measures of A. We got E, D, Aa on the end. Let's do it together. Ready? Here we go. 1, 2, A, 2 A, 3, A, 4.

A d.

Let's do it again.

Sam.

There you go. That is a 12 bar blues in A. Now Lauren, what if I'm playing a song that's not in a great question. So say for example, you're playing something in B. Let's do B because it's really easy. Just means we have to shift everything up two notes. So the A note was the fifth fret on the top string. Well, guess what B is the seventh fret on the top string. It's the same pattern.

Okay, then our next chord would be here.

And that would be our V chord. What if we're playing blues in the key of G? Well, you have the G Note is the third fret in the top string G. Down one string. 3, 3, 5. Now build your chords around it.

Okay, alarm. What if I'm in the key of C? Well, we'll start on the fifth string, third fret and it's going to be three, three, five.

Okay. So you can just see it's just this pattern that you can move all over the guitar. So if you know what your starting chord is, you find the note and then you just build the chords around what you're playing. That's what's so cool about 12 Bar Blues is it's very repetitive and using these power chords, it actually is pretty simple to do. And that's what I do in my videos. I try to simplify complicated things and just make it possible for you to be able to play and have fun on your guitar. So if you're interested in taking this to the next level, learning that cool little.

We want to learn that cool little blues trick. Check out that lesson right over there.