Do You Really Know The 12-Bar Blues? Here's A Test
Ask almost any guitar player if they know the 12-bar blues and you'll get the same answer. Oh yeah, I learned that years ago.
Then you ask them to play it.
What happens more often than you'd think is that somewhere around two-thirds of the way through, it starts to fizzle. They lose their place. And you can see the moment it lands on them: huh, I thought I knew that better.
I'm not throwing stones here. That was me for a long time. I had convinced myself I knew the 12-bar blues really well when what I actually knew was of it. If you'd handed me a pencil I could probably have written it out. But I hadn't internalized it to the point where it ran in the background, and that turns out to be the whole ballgame.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it does
When you're playing a blues solo, you need to know what's coming. If part of your attention is tied up tracking where you are in the form, that's attention you don't have available for anything else.
And everything else is where the music lives. Phrasing. Vibrato. Bending. Choosing notes that sit well against the chord that's actually happening right now instead of hoping something works.
This is why so many players end up sounding like they're running up and down a scale. It isn't that they lack ideas. It's that their head is full.
The test
Put your guitar down.
I don't ask people to do that very often, but this is the fastest way to find out where you stand. Can you sing through the whole 12-bar blues progression, start to finish, without stopping to work it out?
It doesn't have to sound good. Mine doesn't. Nobody's listening.
If you can sing it, you've internalized it, and you're in a great spot to start building everything else on top. If you get partway through and have to stop and think, that's worth knowing. It tells you exactly what to work on first, and it's a much shorter job than it feels like.
The progression, in A
Four bars of the 1 chord, which is A.
Two bars of the 4 chord, D.
Two more bars of the 1, back to A.
One bar of the 5 chord, E.
One bar of the 4 chord, D.
One bar of the 1, A.
And the last bar is the 5, E.
That's the whole thing. Twelve bars, three chords, in a specific order.
Four ways to get it internalized
Coming at this from several directions works far better than grinding on one.
Listen. Put a 12-bar jam track on and let it repeat. Four minutes of nothing but the progression going around. Don't play along yet. Just listen until you can predict where the chords are going before they get there.
Study. Look at the chord chart. Take it in visually. Four bars of the 1, two of the 4, two of the 1, and so on. Some of this sticks better through your eyes than your ears.
Play. Now play along with the track. This adds a layer, because you're no longer just following, you're producing. Open chords or power chords are completely fine.
Sing. Put the track on and sing along with the roots, following what the bass is doing. Then turn the track off and see if you can keep going on your own.
That last one is the final test, and it's the one that tells you you're done.
This is square one
Everything in blues guitar sits on top of this, rhythm and lead alike. The better you have it, the easier every single thing that comes after it becomes.
If you'd like help getting this and the rest of the foundations down, the Blues Jam Jumpstart is our free mini-course. Three short videos, a PDF, and the chord chart and jam track from this video. It walks you through the three things that make blues improvising start to click the link below.
Get the free Blues Jam Jumpstart at GuitarFam.com/bluesjam
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