Blues for Beginners: Master the 12-Bar Blues

1. An intro to The Blues (piano): Hi, guys. I'm Ben, and I'm a musician living and working here in London. And I wanted to put together a course on playing the blues and the 12 bar blues specifically. Now, a lot of my students are classical players, but they say, Ben, please, I want to make life more interesting. Please, can you teach me how to play some jazz? And the thing about jazz is it's based a lot on improvisation and your ability to make tunes up. And so for this course, on the blues. It's intended to be for beginners, for intermediates because we're starting really from basics. We're starting with a bit of jazz harmony. We're looking at key chords, cord C, chord F, and chord G. And then I'm going to teach you how to play a boogie woogie bass line. I'm going to teach you how to play a walking bass line. And then I'm also going to use the blues scale and show you how to make some improvisations using that scale over the top of your piece. All in all, I reckon it's going to be quite a fun introductory course. Don't worry if you think, Oh, this he's done videos on advanced piano technique. Oh, my gosh, how am I going to do it? Well, don't worry. It's going to be pretty straightforward, starting from the basics, and I've got a nice overhead camera that's going to show you exactly which keys to press. Absolutely no piano sheet music reading is required for this course because I'm showing you everything here and at a really steady pace. I hope that you enjoy this course and I'm going to learn to play a bit of the blues. Here we go. 2. 3 VIP Chords : So the 12 bar blues, all about structure. And it's based on three chords. And you'll find a lot of music after the blues has been influenced by those three chords. The chords we use are Cord one, in this instance, C major. So practice that chord, C, E and G. Then we move up to chord four. F, A and C. Then we come back to Cord one, C, E and G. So now we make our big leap right up to Cord five, otherwise known as the dominant Cord, which is G major. And then we step down onto Cord F, Cord four. And then we're back to Cord one. Before you start any baseline, before you start any improvisation, it's so important to know the structure of these chords. So I'm going to play them kind of in slow motion. One, four. One. Five, four. One. Here they are one more time. One, four. One. Five, four. One. You might sort of start to recognize pieces that it sort of sounds like. You'll see this structure coming through music all the time, referred to as the 12 bar blues. So cord one, Cord four. Chord one. Cord five, Cord four. Chord one. Now, if you're not if three notes is too many play, that's absolutely fine. You could just play C F, C. G F C. And you'll find the it's kind of divided into two sections. This is the first section, C F C. Then the second section, G F. C. So it's almost like a little question, C F C. Answered by G F, C. And this idea kind of loops and loops and loops and loops around. And what it gives is jazz musicians the ability to improvise at different sections within the piece. So you might find that you play once through those chord structures just as written. And then the next time you go through, say, your saxophone takes a solo in the section and then perhaps the trumpet or piano or whatever. And then you play, again, a little tune. Um, but the structure is always is very strict. So one? Four, one. Five, four, one. People hear jazz and they think, Oh, it's so free. You can sort of do whatever you want, and arguably, you can. If you're playing, you can do what you want. But the structure, the technique that goes behind it, it's really good to sort of know what's going on with those chords and kind of how they work. So that would be my first port of call. Practice your chords. You're one. You're four. You're one. You're five. You're four, you're one. Great stuff. 3. It's all about that bass: So here we go. Absolutely key is the baseline in the 12 bar Blues. You can crack the baseline, you can pretty much get away with anything else in the right hand. So we normally play the baseline with our left hand. And I've got two different baselines for you here. I've got what we call a walking base. I'll just give you a demonstration. Goes a bit like that. The other option is your boogie woogie base, which is a little bit more a little bit easier, I would say, if you're just starting out, the hands stay pretty much in the same position all the way through. And the boogie woogie base is a bit like this. Okay. So let's start firstly with that. So this is the boogie woogie base. Now, the first two notes you want to find are C and G. Play C with your little finger of the left hand, and then we're going to play G with the thumb of the left hand. That's your first position. C with a little finger of the left hand, and then G with the thumb of the left hand. So that's position one. Now, position two, we've got to move one, two, three notes up. To F with a little finger and C with the thumb. After we've played that, we then move back to C and G, where we started, C with a little finger and G with the thumb. Now, as you're learning this boogie woogie base, just start with those two cord positions. So we've got C and G. We've got F and C. Just practice moving between them, so we're going to go. Get that really comfortable. Now, there is one more cord to come in a minute. Now, don't worry about that. So we'll say that's sea cord. And F chord. Remember, a chord is where we play more than one note at the same time. So two notes is a chord, three notes is a chord, four notes is a chord and on. Any more than one note, we call a chord. So C and G F and C. Now, the 12 bar blues, we start with the C chord. We go to the F chord, and then we come back to the C chord. Now we've got to find one new chord, and it's called the G chord. So where the thumb currently is, we're actually going to replace with a little finger. So we've got G and D. This is the G chord. After we've played that G chord, we step down to F. And then we're back to the C chord, the first chord. So I'm going to do that really slowly. So we start with C and G. Then we go three notes up to F and C. Then we return to the C chord. Now we got to go a bit higher up to the G chord. Back to the F chord. And then to the C chord. Now, these are the main chords of the 12 bar blues, okay? C, F, C, G, F, C. And the pattern always goes like that. If we speed it up a bit, we get this. Why don't you try that with me. So each cord we're going to play a number of times, ready? So one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, four. You see, at the end, the G chord and the F chord, we just played twice because it seems to make a bit more sense there. So four on each chord apart from at the end. We try that one more time. Let's go a bit slower just to give ourselves more of a chance of getting all those notes. So one A two, A one, two, three, four. So Now, that would be a perfectly good baseline above which to create a tune. But if you want to take it a step further, we can actually move the top note of each chord to make it into what we call this boogie woogie bass style. So instead of just going we're actually going to go like this. Now, that is if you're new to the piano, that is quite a tricky thing to do. So you might prefer to stick with keeping the C and the G always five notes apart on those chords. That's absolutely fine. But if you want that little bit of challenge and just create something that's even more interesting, Remember, the bottom note, the C or the F or the G always stays rooted. So we don't move that bottom note at all. It's only the top note going from G to A to B flat to A to B flat. So we're going up and down. It's actually to practice, it's quite you could do this with two hands. Now, that second called that F, we're going from C to E, forgive me, from C to D to E flat to D to C. Yahoo. Now, remember this bit. We've got a leap right up to G. Now here, Because remember, the G chord, the F chord, they're a little bit shorter rather than doing a whole. You could do that. But actually, in my opinion, it's nice just to go De De, E, D, D, C, D, D, D, C, C, D, D. And then back up. Now I'm gonna go really, really slowly so that you can just check all of these notes. Ready? One, two, one, two, three, four. Yeah. Once you've got it with two hands playing at the same time. That's fantastic. Now practice it just with the one hand like this. So Now, if you think, Whoa, that's way too difficult. I cannot manage that. Remember, you've got a couple of options. To really perfect to get this good, this kind of baseline is gonna take you, I would say a day, couple of days. So don't expect it just to come straight away. That's the first thing. Practice just the five and the ones like this. Uh. Remember that that is a perfectly good baseline. But if you want that little bit of additional challenge, we can move that top note up to keep the boogie woogie going. Now, the other baseline we talked about briefly is the walking base. So let's look at some of those notes and how they might be. So we start with C, E. G A B flat, A G E sync. So I'll do that again. C E G, A, B flat. A GE syn That's part one. Part two. F A C D E flat, D A. That's part two. I'll show you part 21 more time. So F, A, C, D, E flat. D, C, A. Then we actually go back to the first bit and we do C E, G, A, B flat. A G E. Now remember, we've got a leap up to that G chord, so we go G, B, D F. I'll do that again and so G. B, D F. And then F, A, C, D. And then C, G, A, B flat. So I'm gonna play really, really slowly once all the way through. And you might be thinking, Wow, there's a lot of notes there. Don't worry. You can always pause and just have a little go, but all the way through sounds a bit like this. So this is the walking bass so cool because you're like, you're walking around, you know, Imagine big a double bass player, and they sort of moving their hand up and down the fingerboard and getting all of those notes in. So, we call it a walking bass sort of moving around, not kind of sticking on one note. Now, once you've got that, you're pretty happy with it. What you can do is play each one twice with a bit of a swung rhythm. So is Sorry. And you might find as you go along, you think, Oh, I want to change that note a little bit, so you could actually start playing around with bit. You can be a little bit free. So remember, jazz and blues, it's not we don't have to be as strict perhaps as in classical music where everything's written out, and we've sort of got to stick exactly to what's going on here. There's a little bit more freedom. Got two types of bass line now. You've got the boogie woogie bass. And we got the walking bass. As they say, it's all about that base. So good luck with your two baselines. Varied up a little bit, you know, from just cords to the boogie woogie? To the walking. Mem, you don't have to stay in one style. You could switch the piece up a little bit and try some different things in the middle. But good luck with your baseline. 4. The Blues Scale: You got your baseline really locked and loaded. That's great. Now the next thing we want to think about is how we're going to improvise, how we're going to make up a tune over the top. We've got a particular scale to use for this called the blues scale. And this is the blues scale in C that we're going to look at today. So when somebody says, Oh, there's a blue note, Gemini Man is sounding a little bit, it sounds a little bit sad. And it's all about this third note in the scale. So C D E. E actually becomes an E flat. That's what we call the blue note. Sometimes you get a chord. That's got an E and an E flat in it at the same time. We say, Oh, it's pretty bluesy. Pretty busy. It's got a bluesy feel to it. Now, the blue scale is like this. C, E flat. F. F sharp, G, B flat, C. That's what we call the blue scale. So we've got C, E flat. F, F sharp, G, B flat, C. Going down, C, B flat, G F sharp. F E flat. C. If you're playing that scale sort of straight through, you might use these fingers. So you might go one, two, three, four, one, three, four, three, one, three, one, three. What? If we speed it up a bit, Swung or played straight with straight quavers. It's very cool, very cool kind of sounding scale. And in the middle of it, you got this what we call chromaticism, where we go in semitones very small spaces between the notes, and that makes it sound kind of quite edgy and quite jarring. So practice that with both hands with your left hand. In your right hand. Hands together. And this scale works across all of the different keys that we've looked at C F and so it's a really, really handy scale to improvise with. No. What when you're making up a solo over the top of a bass line, what a lot of people fall into the trap of doing is this. Playing the scale kind of up and down without any sort of shorter moments. Remember, we've got a couple of tactics here for making up a solo. You don't need to use all the notes. You could just use two notes, for instance. So just experiment. Choose two of your favorite notes from that blues scale and try and put them with one of those bass lines that we looked at before the block chord bass, the boogie woogie. Or the walking bass. Yeah. So just have a little experiment. Choose a couple of notes from that blue scale. Another couple of tactics you can do. You can swing the rhythms a bit. So rather than just playing we can go. One of my other favorite tactics is called a call and response. So we basically we ask a question with a tune. So we go like, That's our question. In reply, we go. You see? So you're posing a question, then you're answering it with your own tune. It's a really, really nice way to create a lovely solo on the piano. In fact, on any instrument. So just another little tactic to consider. So I'm just going to play you through with a bass line and a bit of a solo over the top, and you can use these for your ideas. 5. How to craft a solo : So this section is kind of about, like, advanced solo techniques. So we've given you a couple of ideas for using a blue scale. Remember we got a whole piano, though. You know, you can go right up to the top. So if you find just staying to One Octave is a bit restrictive and you want to do a bit more, you can start to introduce higher bits in the piano, and then you can get a lovely sort of call and response like this. Yeah, that's when we get little echoes kind of built in there. And with the bass line as well, I drop the bass. You could actually move the left hand down one octave to create a kind of richer, more resonant bass. Some people might find that a little bit too muddy, but I kind of like it. Drop that base part down a little bit, and then higher up. Some other interesting ideas. You can do, you can do this thing called You can almost slide off some of the black keys to give you kind of a fun. And then stuff like introduce a bit of chromatic stuff. That's really fun to do. Have a go at that. So G and C, F sharp, F, E flat, C. The other one the absolute key things is what we call syncopation, which is where we delay the beat somewhat. So rather than just going, What you want to do is put some little pauses in along the way, so Without these pauses, the music sounds kind of Doris, a little bit boring. So you want to introduce loads of space and delay things because that's where we create a bit of the rhythmic interest. And another thing to say is that if you're playing along say, Oh, that sounded wrong, the way to do it is to play it again, and then a wrong note played twice becomes a correct note. So don't worry on this journey. If you're trying things out and they don't really quite work out as you want them to, try again, you know, adjust it slowly and see, kind of what shape the piece takes. Yeah, so don't feel that you've got to be too strict with the soloing. It can be a bit of fun. And the other thing, kind of important thing is not to play too many notes. I think when people first learn this blueskir, they think, Oh, I love it. Sounds great. Kind of dive up and down it like that. But actually, fewer notes is better. Ittle triplet, flex there, uttered da done. Duta. They're quite effective. Um You could play the whole thing with two notes, you know. So have a little go. Just be strict with yourself and try it, right. I'm just gonna try now just with two notes, then with three, then with four, and just gradually start to add. I mean, the piece the thing will work with one note. Even that sounds kind of cool. So just experiment, but don't feel like you got to just play the whole scale up and down up and down because there are other kind of more fun things to do there. Well done. That's. 6. In conclusion : Well done. So this is the whistle stop tour to playing the blues. We've got a lot of detail in there. So we've covered baselines. We've covered the corded baselines. We've covered boogie boogie woogie base. We've covered walking base. We've covered a blues scale. We've covered the cord structures, C, F, C. G F C. And we've looked at some of the more advanced techniques for improvising and creating solos over the top. One of the key things remember here is that the best blues is when you've got a group of people kind of riffing and playing off one another. So if you've got fellow musicians who just want to have a bit of fun, try with different instruments, try with guitar, with voice. I mean, you can even sing solos over the top, if you want, if people don't play an instrument. The key thing is the blues and jazz is all about a conversation between different musicians and bringing other people. And it's kind of quite a sociable kind of art form. Remember, in those jazz bands, when somebody plays a solo, at the end, traditionally, even if it's in the middle of a piece, everybody claps. Yeah, great solo. It's a really kind of respectful and nice way to kind of congratulate people. But yeah, if you've got a little group and you can play together, that's the best way to improve. And it's just having a jam. It's having a bit of fun, but having a knowledge of these structures so that you sort of know you kind of make a mutual agreement as a group about where you are in a piece. But I hope this has been helpful. The bass lines, the improvisation, the chord structures, it's absolutely wonderful structure that kind of impacts on lots of different types of music and continues to do so today. So Thanks so much for listening to my course and best of luck in playing your blues. I'd love to hear them, and hope to hope to work with you again soon. Cheers. All the best.