12 Bar Blues in A
The 12 bar blues are an easy chord progression that can be played in any key. When you have learned the basic twelve bar blues patterns you will have the basis for thousands of popular songs.
What Is The 12 Bar Blues Chord Progression?
The 12 bar blues are one of the most common chord progressions in western music. The 12 bar blues are usually written on 3 lines. Each of the 3 lines is subdivided into four bars. There are 4 beats in every bar of the progression.
Normally the 1st, 4th and 5th chords of the key are used for the twelve bar blues, but there are plenty of variations to this. If you don’t know what this means it is explained below.
The 12 Bar Blues in A
To understand the 12 bar blues you are going to use the key of A. The twelve bar blue sin A is one of the most common version of the progression played by guitarists.
To learn the twelve bar blues in A you need to be able to play the A major, D major and E major guitar chords. You’ll also need a basic understanding of guitar scales.
If you look at the scale of A major you will find that A is the first chord of the scale, D is the 4th chord of the scale and E is the 5th chord of the scale.
The twelve bar blues uses the 1st, 4th and 5th parts of a scale in the chord progression.
You don’t need to worry about chord variations like 7th chords and 9th chords for the 12 bar blues in this lesson. You will about that in future posts.
For the key of A the most common version of the 12 bar blues chord progression will look like this. The ‘|’ between the letter indicates a bar line. Each letter means one strum on your guitar.
| A A A A | A A A A | A A A A | A A A A |
| D D D D | D D D D | A A A A | A A A A |
| E E E E | D D D D | A A A A | E E E E |
Filed under: Learn Guitar Chords