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Learn And Master The Guitar: Blues Camp Songs with Only 3 Chords

By Mike Hayes | December 4, 2008

It may come as a surprise to many budding guitarists to learn that a large number of commercially successful pop songs have been based on the harmonic templates of the blues.

This tradition continues today, often a new artist bursts on the scene with a “new” song that takes the musical world by storm … the format? You guessed it, the blues!

Did you know that Mustang Sally by The Commitments, Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry, Let’s Stick Together by Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music and Hound Dog by Elvis Presley are all blues based songs?

To be fair you most likely didn’t notice this very significant
musical fact of life because we are not trained  on “how” to
listen to music.

Sure, we have all sorts of music tests at school where we have to pick the interval of a minor third or major second and stuff like that to pass the music exams, however we are not instructed as to how to really pay attention to the sounds we are hearing.

And that’s the key to being able to remember songs, you have to pay attention to the music you are listening to, you have to be actively involved in the listening process.

Why is this important? Because you can mentally pigeon-hole songs as you hear them, you will be able to instantly associate new material to songs you already know, this accelerates the learning process and saves hours of wasted practice time.

In this instance we are discussing blues tunes that contain only three chords, if we take a closer look we can divide and sub- divide the blues genre into three popular templates(a) 12 bar blues, (b) 16 bar blues, (c) 24 bar blues and (d) 8 bar blues.

These four blues templates represent the blues “form”, our next task is to identify the content of each blues template.

By the word “content”, I am referring to the harmonic background (chords) of each blues.

12 bar blues:

1/// | 1/// | 1/// | 1/// |

 4/// | 4/// | 1/// | 1/// |

 5/// |4/// | 1/// | 1/// ||

There are four common variations to the 12 bar blues, however this progression is one of the most popular. You could use this progression for “Hound Dog”, and “Let’s Stick Together”.

16 bar blues:

1/// | 1/// | 1/// | 1/// |

1/// | 1/// | 1/// | 1/// |

 4/// |4/// | 1/// | 1/// |

5/// |4/// | 1/// | 1/// ||

The 16 bar progression works well for the verse of songs like “Be Bop A Lula”, incidentally, the chorus of Be Bop A Lula is the 12 bar blues progression.

24 bar blues:

1/// | 1/// | 1/// | 1/// |

1/// | 1/// | 1/// | 1/// |

 4/// |4/// | 4/// | 4/// |

 1/// |1/// | 1/// | 1/// |

5/// | 5/// |4/// | 4/// |

1/// | 1/// |1/// | 1/// ||

Mustang Sally would fit this progression.

8 bar blues:

1/// | 5/// | 4/// | 4/// |

1/// | 5/// | 1/// | 5/// ||

Songs like B.B King’s “Keys To The Highway” work well over this progression.

So there you have it, concentrate on developing your ability to associate music you are already familiar with to music you are currently listening to and trying to learn.

From Mike Hayes – The Guitar Coaching Guy & the Express Guitar
System

http://www.GuitarCoaching.com
http://AdvancingGuitaristProgram.com

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