Freddie Green Comping Chords Over a 12 Bar Dominant Blues in G

Hey gang, it's Scott Perry. I've got this really cool lesson for you. I was inspired to do this by my student Noah, who had asked me about the kind of chords I was playing as I was backing him up on a 12-bar blues. And I get this question from a lot of students. I've taught it to a lot of different students. These are chord voicings that were pioneered by Freddie Green, the longtime guitar player for the Count Basie Band, and really one of the, the impetuses that, that made the Count Basie Band one of the most popular and hardest swinging bands of the the big, big band era was Freddie Green and his, his comping. Really strong, driving, four-to-the-floor rhythm, using some very chunky spare voicings that fit in great with a big orchestra. But they can be used in small ensemble settings, and they sound great when you're playing all by yourself and just playing and singing a 12-bar blues. So here they are, these voicings. We're just going to use two different fingerings. That are going to be movable, and we're going to use them to play in this lesson just over a really basic 12-bar blues in the key of G using all dominant chords. And the voicings are going to all only employ the 6th, 4th, and 3rd strings. No 5th string, we're going to mute that one. No 2nd string, we're going to mute that one. We're going to make sure we don't play the 1st string as well. The first voicing is G7. And we're going to put our first finger at the third fret of the sixth string, second finger at the third fret of the fourth string, third finger at the fourth fret of the third string. We often call these voicings, or number them by the frets that we're on, so this voicing would be a 3-3-4 voicing. We always know that we're working from the sixth string down and we're skipping the fifth string. Uh, you don't have to play with the first 3 fingers. You could— a lot of people play this chord with their pinky on the 3rd string, so it'd be the 1st finger, 2nd, uh, 2nd finger, and then the pinky is on the 3rd string. You could obviously play it with the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th finger. The fingers that you use are less important than what feels comfortable to you and what you're able to play while you navigate the chord changes. I often will play just with the first 3 fingers. I most frequently see people play it with the 1st, 2nd, 4th finger, but again, whatever works for you. So here's a real easy 12-bar blues, dominant blues in the key of G, using the Freddie Green style chords. The G7 voicing I just showed you— the only other voicing is the C7 voicing, which is movable up to the D7. At C7, it's going to be— your, your numbers are 3, 2, 3. Third— or second finger, rather, is on the 6th string, 3rd fret. First finger's at the 2nd fret of the 4th string. Third finger's at the 3rd fret of the 3rd string. When I need a D7, I'll simply slide that up 2 frets to the 5th fret. I've got D7. Your basic 12-bar blues is just 4 measures of G, 2 measures of C, 2 measures of G, 2 measures of D, 2 measures of G. Again, we're going to use all dominant chords, so G7 for 4, C7 followed by G7, 2 each, then 2 D7s, 2 G7s. It's going to sound like this. I'll count you through. 1, 2, 1, 2, ready, go. G7, measure 3 here, C7 for measure 5, and measure 6 back to G7 for measures 7 and 8, D7 for measure 9 and 10, and then back to G7 for 11 and 12. Just one other thing for this lesson here, um, you could— there are lots of things that you can do with these chords to make interesting chord, uh, interesting substitutions and chord different chord progressions within a 12-bar blues. There are nice little things, inversions you can use to create bass lines, substitutions that you can use to create cool bass lines. We'll get to that in future videos, or you can ask me about it in your lesson. But one thing to always remember is that with the blues in particular, you can always approach a chord from a fret below or fret above. So for instance, if I were to do— and I just call that slipping and sliding— so something just to add a little rhythmic interest might sound like this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, measure 3, measure 5, Measure 6, measure 7 and 8, measure 9, 10, and 11, and 12. So there you go. That's— you can start having some fun with that right away. I'll put together another video where we'll talk about putting some interesting turnarounds and jazzing up that progression a little bit. And then a little bit further in the future, we'll talk about how to use inversions and substitutions to get some cool bass line stuff going on. There's a PDF down, down there with the 12-bar blues in G and another PDF with the chord shapes that we're talking about. And there's a little MP3 play-along that you can, you can play along with to get some practice playing an easy Dominant blues in the key of G7 using Freddie Green chords. If you like this type of thing and you want to hear about future lessons, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. That's down there. You can also go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, and you'll get updates about video lessons and performances and all that sort of thing. Hey, my son just called me, so I gotta go. We'll talk to you later.