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To understand the blues, it’s important to have a basic knowledge of how the blues progression is derived.  They are based on a pattern derived from musical scales. 

Scales in music follow a specific pattern which can be seen easily on the Piano keyboard.  The white keys form the Natural Major and Minor keys.  “Natural” basically means that succession of notes that form a major or minor key occurs naturally, without any alteration in the naturally occurring pattern. 

We’ll begin with the major mode:  The white keys on the piano form the key of C Major.  The notes in the key are as follows:  C – D – E -  F – G- A – B – C.  Below, we have a graphic depiction of two octaves (two groups of 8 notes) from the C Major scale.  The numbering (2^nd row) below each letter is a Roman numeral which indicates the order of the notes.  The scale begins on the note “C” and ends on the note “C”; so there are 7 unique names, because the first and last notes have the same name.

For playing the Blues, we would use chords based on the 1^st, 4^th and 5^th (I, IV and V) notes of the scales.  The chords take the names form the notes.  So in the key of C, the Blues progression would be based on the C – F and G notes.

We are going to learn to play the blues in the key of A.  So let’s convert this to the A Major scale:

The Blues progression in the key of A Major are based on A(I), D(IV) and E(V)

The most basic Blues progression, referred to as “12-Bar Blues”, consist of 12 measures or bars of music with the following progress in the following manner:

Note:  stroke the chord once for each slash appearing below the chord name.  Continue playing the same chord until the next chord names occurs.

A more interesting sound  can be achieved by using a “Quick Change”.  The quick change is playing the IV in the  2^nd measure of the Blues progression.  It’s “quick” because you didn’t wait till the 5^th measure to play it.

This Blues progression can be used to play songs like "Day Tripper" and "Why Don't We Do It On the Road" (Beatles), "Shake, Rattle & Roll" (Big Joe Turner), "Kansas City" (Chuck Berry), "Should I Stay or Should I Go" (The Clash), Theme from the "Batman" TV Series, "Hound Dog" (Elvis Presley), and thousands of additional blues tunes. Practice the progression until it can be played smoothly ad different speeds. 

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