12 Bar Blues
The 12 bar blues is the backbone for a large range of modern musical styles including rock, pop and jazz. This fantastic book and CD set is devoted to providing the new blues guitarist with all the theory and practical knowledge needed to play the 12 bar blues with style and authority.
This set is packed with 24 full band tracks covering styles as diverse as shuffle, swing, riff, boogie and jazzy blues progressions; Chicago, minor, bebop, slow, and other blues styles; soloing, intros, turnarounds, accompanying keyboards and more.
All of the tunes are clearly written in both standard notation and guitar tablature.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Must have set for any blues guitarist
This set is a must have for any intermediate blues guitarist, especially anyone that wants to play blues with a band.
It’s great for anyone who has played for more than a year, mastered the basic guitar chords and the pentatonic scales.
There are chord progressions and riffs for every type of blues playing, as well as a brief section on turnarounds and intros.
The majority of the examples are movable. This makes them extremely useful for changing between keys. I’m well on my way to memorizing the whole book. Well worth the money and well worth the time.
5 Stars Good intro to blues guitar playing
Excellent book introducing the fundamentals of blues chords and basic 12-bar progressions. It is on the beginner side, and while it provides a great basic course on blues styles and chords, it doesn’t pay too much attention to rhythm patterns, and theory is given out in small doses.
The book has progressions in different keys to get you going with a variety of styles, including your basic slow blues, shuffle rhythms, swing & boogie, riff blues and some cool jazz stuff, etc. Most examples are movable chords, so it gets you playing all over the neck. The explanations are low key but pretty good, pointing out info on the sounds and tonality of the different chords, and some advice on getting a good sound.
There are also sections including some generic but cool turnarounds and intros, and a couple pages about soloing.
Don’t think you’ll be blazing open mic night after this book, but you will have a good foundation in chords and 12-bar progressions.
4 Stars Great for Blues Riff Building
If you want to play in a blues band, you will need to know these riffs.
You should even go so far as to memorize the entire book so you can play it in your sleep. There isn’t a lot of fancy stuff in here, but it is a solid foundation in blues guitar playing.
Before I found this book I had been playing for years and I thought I was pretty good, but I always fell apart when I tried to play with others. That’s because I did not have these basic building blocks.
5 Stars A fantastic book for blues fundamentals
I am a beginning blues guitarist and this book has been a huge help.
I just wanted to say that the thing that makes this book so valuable is the fact that after you learn one of the lessons you will find that you are now armed with a technique that allows you to play many different songs.
After I got fairly comfortable with that I found that I could play born under a bad sign, sunshine of your love etc. There are many songs that use that same combination of notes just varied in timing and order a little. That seems to be the case with chord progressions as well. If you are a beginner like me, remember to play chords that are easy at first then progressively try to play the more difficult ones. Eventually you will be able to play the same chords the pros use. Also as a beginner you probably use open chords. You won’t really see how the chords work until you use bar chords so start incorporating those into your playing. I would recommend the F bar chord and the B minor bar chord as there are really no good open chord versions of those. Also learn the A D E bar chord combination at the 5th and 7th frets.
I used to think that the more guitar books I owned the better guitarist I will be. That has not proven to be true. I probably have 30 or so guitar books on the shelf and of those 30 I only use maybe 5, one of which is this 12 bar blues book, the other being Progressive guitar chords.
Filed under: Blues Guitar Lessons