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Guitar Tricks - The Learning Guitar Player's Resource

As a guitar player you have probably trawled the internet looking for guitar lessons. Whether or not you want to learn to play guitar for free, your vision probably involved learning songs form tabs as well as getting as much theory and technique exercises you can handle.
Ten years ago a guy named Jon Broderick went looking for websites featuring high quality guitar lessons and, the legend goes, he had so little success, he went and made his own. The outcome was Guitar Tricks, another site that gives you access to their lessons in return for a monthly subscription. Not unlike Jamplay, but Guitar Tricks has been collecting guitar lessons for ten years, plus they have a collection of twenty-four free guitar lessons that you can try. Your free lessons are of the same quality as the lessons you get with your monthly subscription, taught by the same teachers who conduct the lessons for subscribers to Guitar Tricks.
Your membership of Guitar Tricks gets you full access to a buttload of tutorials, sheet music, video lessons and backing tracks. Not only do you get the benefit of the Guitar Tricks guys' years of archiving guitar lessons but their content is updated every day.
Guitar Tricks has a forum that holds the records of questions and answers between thousands of guitarists. Would you believe there's over two-hundred thousand posts? And not only that, you can also have feedback from the Guitar Tricks teachers on any nagging question your brain can formulate.

The Twelve Bar Blues Chord Progression

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Knowing your twelve bar blues chord progression is one of the best ways to get a handle on playing guitar. Once you understand the basic principles of blues guitar, you can start to experiment with improvising within the chord progressions and to put your own mark on the music.

The twelve bar blues chord progression is very widely used in pop and rock music. If you have listened to and tried to play some blues songs, you will understand how popular this basic chord sequence is. In playing blues guitar you take the main chord of the song you are playing, which is called the “tonic”, the fifth step of the scale – the “dominant”, and the chord below the dominant, the “subdominant”, or fourth step. So if you are playing a song in the key of E your tonic chord is E, the subdominant is A and the dominant is B. If you are playing in the key of A, your chords are A, D and E.

In musical notation your chord sequence is commonly written in Roman numerals. In the case of the twelve bar blues chord progression, it will be written as I IV V. Using this notation you can tell which chords you will be using in any key.

So let’s look at how the twelve bar blues chord progression actually progresses. Well, the first four bars use the tonic chord, in the fifth and sixth you play the subdominant, in the seventh and eight you will play the tonic again, in bar nine it’s the dominant, in bar ten it’s the subdominant and in the eleventh and twelfth bars it’s the tonic, or in this bar the dominant seventh chord is usually used to prepare for the tonic chord to begin the progression again.

The fact is that the seventh chord is used a lot in blues music rather than just the straight major chord. This will make the chord sequence in the key of E look like this:

E7 E7 E7 E7

A7 A7 E7 E7

B7 A7 E7 E7

Or you could just play the seventh chords in the fourth and twelfth bars like this:

E E E E7

A A E E

B A E E7

Or you could play all major chords except for the subdominant and the final bar:

E E E E

A7 A7 E E

B A7 E E7

So there you have a couple of variations in the twelve bar blues chord progression already. Once you have the feel of the progression using open chords, you can try experimenting with the barre chord and power chord versions of the basic chords.

Here is Justin with a lesson on moving your blues progression around to play in any key:

And here is a lesson on playing blues guitar in E from Chord Charts For Guitar.


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