12 Bar Blues

The 12 Bar Blues is a very famous chord progression that is not only common in blues music, but also in rock, hard rock, and many other genres directly or indirectly influenced by blues music. Even bands that you wouldn’t normally associate with blues music, such as the Clash or Queen, have used this progression or a derivative form of it in their songs. While it is a very simple progression, it ends up being a very useful one that gives all sorts of options in how it is used. The popularity of the 12 Bar Blues is very similar to that of the minor pentatonic scale (which is frequently used in leads over this particular progression), on their own, neither is particularly interesting, but in good hands the simple nature of both allows all sorts of options that would be near impossible to try to do over say a Lydian or Locrian chord progression.

The 12 Bar Blues is based around a 12 bar structure that can either be repeated or can be linked up to another section of the song with a different chord progression structure. The use of the I, IV, and V chords means that if you want a major progression, then you play all major chords, and if you want a minor progression, then you play all minor chords. This makes choosing the chords in the overall structure of the progression very easy to choose. The following is what chord is placed in each of the 12 bars.

It is pretty rare, however, to see anyone actually use the most basic form of the progression. The big issue is that when you are repeating it, you end up with 6 bars of straight I chords. In addition, since there is no chord transition when moving from the 12th bar back to the 1st bar, it usually makes it hard for the listener to hear when you are repeating it. A turnaround is usually used to fix this, which usually consists of a chord change in the 12th and sometimes also the 11th bar. This chord change breaks up the long row of I chord bars and gives the listener a distinct structure change to hear when the progression is supposed to repeat, solving both issues in one fell swoop. A simple example of this is shown below.

It may look like a small change, but when you are actually playing the progression, adding a turnaround makes a huge difference. You don’t have to use a V chord or even only use one chord in the bar. For example, you could split the 12th bar between a IV and V chord. It really depends on what style of music and what tone the song, so play with it to find what turnaround sounds good to you.

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While overall, each bar should have the tonality of a single chord, that doesn’t actually mean you have to use that chord the entire time. Some songs use riffs in place of chords for the rhythm parts. Instead of changing chords, the song will change the note the riff is based around. An example of this is shown below.

The riff in each bar uses the exact same intervals, but the note the riff is centered around changes from one bar to the next. One thing to keep in mind is that you do have to pay attention to what notes you use, since you can very easily go out of key using this approach. This particular example almost fits in E minor pentatonic, except the last bar for the V ends on a major 2nd note. It is still in the full E minor scale, so that isn’t likely to be a huge issue, but if that note had been something like a major 3rd, it could have been a very noticeable problem.

The best way to start out using this structure is to get it down with just chords and work out some turnarounds. Once you have those, you can start experimenting with riffs and more elaborate techniques. The important thing is that when you do use those more elaborate techniques, you do have to make sure the listener is still hearing the progression. In the above example, since the same riff is repeated, the listener does still audibly hear the change in tonal center, despite there not being a full chord in the progression. It can take a little work, but it will be well worth it to have a solid base progression for your own songwriting.