The Blues The blues are arguably one of the most important chord progressions out there. They have played a part in many great tunes, and they are an enduring art form. A musician can go anywhere in the world to jam session and play along with the blues right from the start. The blues put the blue in bluegrass. So here's the lowdown. It will be an overview. To get into too much detail would take tons of e-mails. 12-Bar form The blues begin with a pretty standard twelve measure (bar) set of changes that get modified by individuals to create their own special sound. To understand the blues, we need to go back to our scales, covered in the beginning. To get a bluesy sound you need to take a major scale and flat the third and seventh note. Some like to also flat the fifth setting up a nice chromatic phrase that goes fourth, flat fifth, fifth. So if we take the key of C as our example:
The "E", and "B" would be flattened to "Eb" and "Bb" respectively. If you flat the fifth, "G", to "Gb" (note we didn't call the note "F#") you would actually have the notes of the "Eb" scale. If you wanted to, you could play in "Eb" while the band is playing Blues chord changes, and it would work quite nicely. It is probably more preferable to learn to flat the third and seventh and play that instead. what we end up having is a minor sounding scale played over major chords. The conflict is what makes the blues so special. Of course you could also play the blues scales in standard tunes as a way of spicing up a tune. The pros do it all the time. Tony Rice lives by blues scales in bluegrass, and Bill Monroe liked them too. I have a transcription on co-mando.com of Ricky Skaggs playing "Old Joe Clark" from the "Mandolin Extravaganza" CD, and for the first four measures he plays the melody straight (almost like the simple version you would find in any fiddle-tune book), and then plays a blues lick on the other four. It sounds really cool. He does this again for the next eight measures. Check it out. An excerpt of the tune is at: You can hear what I'm talking about. The uses of this technique are limitless, and it really makes your playing shine. But enough of scale and lead playing, let's look at the chords. Next |
