This irresistibly fun & quick-fire tutorial will get you jamming the blues immediately!

In this 10-minute video tutorial you’ll learn how to play the iconic 12-bar-blues structure on piano in any key!

A blues framework

The 12-bar-blues is the foundation of learning to play the blues. It’s made up of (you guessed it) 12 bars, or measure, of music.

Each bar has a particular chord (out of 3 options) that need to be played.

Those three chord options are the I, the IV and the V chord.

i, iv & v?

You might not have seen these types of chords before. This is a way to think about the chords that we play in relation to each other, without locking them down to a certain key.

This is the part of the formula that means we can play the 12-bar-blues structure in ANY key, without having to learn the whole thing starting from every note in the octave.

These letters, are in fact numbers! Referring to the Roman Numeral system. The reason we use these instead of our usual numerical system is because we already use numbers in so many things in music, it can start to get confusing (scale degrees, fingering numbers, chord symbols)… so we can use the Roman numbers as a way to distinguish our conversations about chord progressions.

‘I’ means ‘one’.

‘IV’ means ‘four’.

‘V’ means ‘five’.

numbering the scale

These new Roman numbers are based on the home key.

Whatever key we are in, that is the ‘1’ or ‘I’. We build a major chord on that key.
Example: If we are playing the 12-bar-blues in the key of C major, our 1 chord (I) would be the C major chord.

To get the IV (four) and the V (five) chords, we just count up the scale.

Example: In the key of C major (which has no sharps or flats) we can continue up the scale one key at a time, from C counting 1 up to 4 - finding that ‘F’ is the root note of our IV chord. Then counting to 5 is the next note, ‘G’ which is the root note of our V chord.

putting it into 12 bars

Now we have our I, IV and V chords in the C major key (or any key you are working in), we need to order them properly.

The 12-bar blues structure goes like this:

4 bars of the I chord.
2 bars of the IV chord.
2 bars of the I chord.
1 bar of the V chord.
1 bar of the IV chord.
1 bar of the I chord.
1 bar of the V chord.

All in that order - sometimes it’s helpful to make a grid like the above image. You’ll notice that if we split this pattern into 3 rows of 4, each new row halves the amount of bars we spend on each chord!

adding blues flavour

Simply playing these chords one-to-each-bar, and as simple triad chords doesn’t sound particularly bluesy. But this is the basic framework. From here you can add more and more blues flavour to give it that smooth, smoky rich quality.

The first blues flavour you might like to add is changing the final ‘V’ chord to a ‘V7’ chord. This is a dominant 7th chord, all you do is add the minor 7th note at the top of the chord (1 whole tone down from the octave of the root note). Try it and see!