12 Bar Blues Lesson For Beginners

[Music] do [Music] hey what's up you guys marty schwartz here with marty music and i'm revisiting a tried and true topic but i want to give you an introductory lesson into the 12 bar blues now real quick i have uh you know a very uh intensive course with tabs and charts and it takes you through the you know basic blues step by step at mardi music.com but this is a great lesson all on its own and also it's inspired uh by the original lesson on mardi music that i put out on the 12 bar blues which came out on the first day that marty music launched and a little back story you know i was kind of in a transition in my career trying to get mardi music ready and i was kind of scrambling every single day making videos leading up to the release of the channel so i could have you know somewhere around 100 videos to be out on the day of the channel launch and apparently my 12 hour blues there was a lot of comments i'm only playing 11 bars and honestly it's very possible because that was a kind of a crazy time of uh you know lots of multitasking going on in my life stressful multitasking uh but anyway marty music's almost five years old now and i'm having the best time i've ever had doing this and so to celebrate that i'm gonna do a redo on a basic 12 bar blues for you guys and i think it's a really important skill if you want to learn to get better at guitar so let's zoom in and have some fun feeling nice and relaxed now and i want to thank you for your support here we go all right so a 12 bar blues means that the progression lasts 12 bars and then starts over again a bar is a count of four one two three four two two three four three two three four so that was just three bars so the whole progression lasts 12 of those and then starts over and does 12 more 12 more 12 more 12 more and uh at some point you have to try and end it but that can be hard to do and it's really fun to solo over as well it's also the you know bait the building blocks of of rock uh and you know it's kind of the language that carried on into all the you know modern music so it's definitely good to know and it's great for guitar you know studying guitar it's such a all the techniques involved with blues carry over into everything uh so let's talk about those 12 bars i'm going to try and keep it simple with the with the open chords first so you have three chords that make up the blues you have what's called the one chord the four chord and the five chord the one chord for us is going to be e7 [Music] just like an e major chord put the ring finger off which makes the open d ring out which is called the seventh seven it makes it sound bluesy so then the four chord is an a7 and it's the middle finger on the second fret d ring finger on the second fret b now you can play with these two fingers i prefer this so that's called the iv chord then you have the v chord which is b7 [Music] and so that's second fret a first fret d second fret g [Music] and then try and get your pinky on that second fret high e [Music] if you're a beginner you can use it without the pinky and then eventually as you get more comfortable at it all right so we talked about this 12 bar 12 bars of these one four and five [Music] four chords two three four five six seven eight nine [Music] ten 11 12. [Music] so that was the 12 bars with the chords underneath obviously when you think of blues you probably think more of so when i'm doing this right now that's just a like a riff that is implying an e7 chord [Music] so it's a little bit harder to play for a beginner so you know we'll get to that get to that but let's go back to those 12 bars so we're gonna start with one two three four two two three four three two three four four bars of e7 then two three four seven two two bars of a7 back to two bars of e7 three one two three four then b seven two three four a seven two three four e seven two three four b seven two three four so let's count out to make sure it's 12 bars one two three four two three four five six seven 8 9 10 11 12. so that that's called the turnaround five [Music] four one five like so so that's the first step but now we want to substitute those e7 just long right we want to now add that blues boogie riff to it now the cool thing is one guitar player could be playing what i just showed you e7 especially like a beginner who's just trying to keep up i mean if you know those three chords and you can switch them pretty comfortably you can do a blues jam and uh you know someone's someone's garage or an open blues jam and you can play right along with the chords and it's gonna be great it's gonna be fun and good for you even if you're a beginner so now anytime you have e7 instead we want to work on this it's the open e string and the second fret a string [Music] so the e string's ringing out and then now my index is here my ring finger goes up to the fourth fret of that a string and you're hearing the e and the a ring out [Music] and then with that finger still down you go [Music] take it really slow if you're a beginner you know do this do that for like three or four minutes and then move on to something else and keep coming back to it so you don't get frustrated you just got to start really slow with it have a few rotate a few different fun little things to work on if you're really really a beginner so for the one chord one two three four two two three four three two four so we just did four measures of this riff and then you just swish switch to the open a string same exact thing but on the d string with your fingers and the open a string two bars two back to two bars of e so back to this and now for the b7 we're going to play the chord not a boogie riff and even for the a7 you can go to the chord for this part of the progression which is the turn around [Music] three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven [Music] twelve [Music] do do [Music] all right so that's something that you build up to so in other words the structure i did at the end there was the exact same thing it was a 12 bar blues and there's just new things that once you map for instance once you master this [Music] then you can add your pinky up improvise how and what you add because it all is going to work over the implied e7 chord [Music] still all that is still the same structure of that 12 bar blues so the last thing i'm going to show you for this video and let me know in the comments if you want to follow up with this i've got an entire you know library of courses at mardimusic.com that take you step by step through all this stuff so and it helps support me so i would recommend you checking out if you're a beginner i've got a beginner blues which is just really goes over this nice and slow with tablatures you know to guide you along the way all right so uh b7 that turn around one two three four a7 here's a great little riff and it's not too hard [Music] it starts over one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven so after the b7 a7 e e [Music] nice and fun you can even do it with one finger if you need to so it starts with that which is an e power chord also known as an e5 it's the open e string and the second fret of the a string [Music] like that then you're gonna slide that finger up or your pinky is what i would want you to eventually get to but so 2nd fret 2 2 5 5 5 4 4 4 3 3 3 2 2 0 1 2 so from that b7 again b7 two three four a7 two three four e five [Music] progression starts over [Music] do [Music] [Music] i hope that helps all right i counted out loud a lot of times it was it was 12 12 bars anyway like i said you guys uh i have you know a bunch of courses at my site marty music that will get deeper into this uh link in the first comment for you to check that out and also uh you know really appreciate you guys subscribing here to marty music youtube channel if you haven't yet and also clicking that bell notification or smashing the bell notification [Music] thank you guys see you later

Channel: Marty Music

Views: 657,350

Keywords: Marty Schwartz, music, guitar, marty music, generic atlas feet, guitar lessons, how to play guitar, beginner guitar lessons, guitar lessons for beginners, guitar for beginners, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, marty schwartz guitar lesson, marty schwartz guitar, 12 bar blues, 12 bar blues guitar, 12 bar blues guitar lesson, 12 bar blues chord progression, twelve bar blues, twelve bar blues guitar, how to play 12 bar blues, beginners 12 bar blues, beginner blues guitar lesson

Id: XFuXLSIYH7s

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021