The 12 bar blues is a pattern that lasts for 12 measures. Those 12 measures could have, 4, 8 12 or how ever many beats, but the concept is that it lasts for 12 measures, hence the 12 bar blues.

The pattern is built by taking particular chords from the notes in a scale. If we think of the notes in a scale has having corresponding numbers, so the first note would be number one, the second note number two and so on, we can easily build the 12 bar blues pattern and piece it together from any major scale we want to (there are other scales you can use also besides just the major scales).

The pattern looks like this: 1 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 4 – 4 – 1 – 1 – 5 – 4 – 1 – 5

Where the numbers in the pattern correspond to particular notes from a scale.

Let’s do an example together. Let’s say we want to play a 12 bar blues style in the Key of A. So we’d look at the A major scale first to determine what notes we need to play.

Here’s the A Major Scale: A – B – C# – D – E – F# – G# – A

So by thinking of each note as a number as described above our first note is going to be A, the fourth note is going to be D and the fifth note will be E.

All that’s left to do now is plug those notes into the number progression we looked at above. So here would be a 12 bar blues in the key of A.

So how do we play these notes? Well most of the time we play them with a shuffle feel in a sort of power chord shape. That is tough to describe so I’ll leave it to the video below to fully explain how to play these notes.

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