Having Fun with 12 Bar Blues - Music Theory
TLDRGareth teaches the 12 bar blues chord progression and pattern, explaining the structure uses 4 bars of C7 chord, 2 bars of F7, 2 bars of C7, 1 bar each of G7 and F7, and 2 final bars of C7. He shows how to build the 7th chords on piano and bass. Gareth then demonstrates ways to apply the pattern - walking bass line or swing rhythm chords. He encourages having fun with it - add melodies, speed it up, jam with others. The simplicity yet flexibility of the 12 bar form means endless potential for creativity.
Takeaways
- 😀 The 12 bar blues is a 12 bar long chord progression that has a bluesy sound
- 🎹 The chords used are C7, F7 and G7 along with variations of these chords
- 🎸 The chord progression follows the pattern: 4 bars C7, 2 bars F7, 2 bars C7, 1 bar G7, 1 bar F7, 2 bars C7
- 🎼 Can be played slow or fast, but good to start slow when learning
- 🎧 Can improvise melodies over the 12 bar blues chord progression
- 🥁 Sounds great with other musicians like a drummer jamming along
- 🎹 Keyboard players can play left hand bass line and right hand chords
- 🎸 Bass players can walk up and down the root notes of each chord
- 🎵 Can be played with a swing rhythm instead of straight rhythm
- 😄 The 12 bar blues pattern provides endless fun musical possibilities
Q & A
What is a 12 bar blues?
-A 12 bar blues is a chord progression that lasts for 12 bars or measures and follows a standard pattern. It has a bluesy sound and uses chords like C7, F7 and G7.
What are the chords used in a basic 12 bar blues progression?
-The chords used are: C7 for bars 1-4, F7 for bars 5-6, C7 for bars 7-8, G7 for bar 9, F7 for bar 10, and C7 for bars 11-12.
How do you construct a 7th chord like C7 or F7?
-To make a 7th chord, start with the root note like C. Then add the 3rd note, 5th note, and flattened 7th note above the root. So C7 contains the notes C, E, G and Bb.
What instruments can you use to play a 12 bar blues?
-You can play 12 bar blues on any instrument like piano, guitar, bass, saxophone, harmonica, or your voice. You would emphasize the chord changes.
What tempo is good for starting with 12 bar blues?
-It's good to start slow with 12 bar blues as you learn the chord changes. You can speed things up later once you get familiar with the form.
How could you make your 12 bar blues more interesting rhythmically?
-You can make 12 bar blues more rhythically interesting by syncopating the chords, adding percussion elements like drums, or improvising melodies over the steady chord changes.
What musicians might you play 12 bar blues with?
-You could play 12 bar blues with other instrumentalists like guitarists, sax players, keyboard players, bass players, drummers, and singers.
How does the chord progression lay the foundation for improvisation?
-The repeating 12 bar blues chord progression provides a harmonic framework for musicians to improvise melodies, solos, and vocals over the top while staying anchored in the key.
Can you vary the feel or groove of a 12 bar blues?
-Yes, 12 bar blues can work over swung rhythms, straight rhythms, slow tempos, fast tempos, gentle feels, and more driving feels while using the same essential 12 bar form.
What makes 12 bar blues an accessible musical form?
-The repetitive chord scheme, flexibility with instrumentation and tempo, and emphasis on expressive melodic improvisation makes 12 bar blues an accessible way for musicians of all skill levels to start playing together.
Outlines
😀 Introducing 12 Bar Blues
😃 Playing the 12 Bar Blues Chords
😊 Trying Out 12 Bar Blues Rhythms
Mindmap
Keywords
💡12 bar blues
💡Chords
💡Improvisation
💡Syncopation
💡Walking bassline
💡Swing rhythm
💡Melody
💡Harmony
💡Tempo
💡Form
Highlights
Proposed a new deep learning model called Transformers that relies entirely on attention mechanisms.
Transformers use multi-headed self-attention to draw global dependencies between input and output.
Self-attention allows the model to attend to different positions of the input sequence to compute a representation.
Transformers achieved state-of-the-art results in machine translation tasks.
First model to achieve human-level performance in neural machine translation.
Does not rely on recurrence or convolution, only attention mechanisms.
Much more parallelizable and faster to train than recurrent models.
Key innovation was the multi-headed attention mechanism.
Multi-headed attention allows the model to jointly attend to information from different positions.
Implemented multi-head attention using linear projections from queries, keys and values.
Showed the strength of attention-based models compared to RNNs and CNNs.
Opened up a new direction in deep learning focused entirely on attention mechanisms.
Enables much more parallelization and reduces the path length between long-range dependencies.
Formed the foundation for the development of BERT and other transformer models.
Transformers have become the dominant model architecture across NLP and other domains.
Transcripts
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