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Impressive Blues Chord Progressions

By Mike Hayes | July 30, 2010

It’s not very often you get to met one of your heroes, I’ve been
very fortunate indeed; I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, studying
and playing with several of my guitar heroes.

Whenever I have had the chance I’ve made a point of really paying
attention to everything that is said as I have always benefited
from the life changing insights and attitudes that have made
these top players what they are today.

On one such occasion I was taking a lesson from Don Andrews who
was one of my long term guitar inspirations, Don and I were
taking a much needed coffee break when one such musical gems
dropped into the conversation.

It had always been a mystery to me how some players got to be so
good (I was about to find out); Don was speaking about how
important jam sessions were in his early musical development, as
he recalled his early jam session experiences he mentioned how a
group of about nine or ten keen fledgling musicians would gather
religiously every Saturday at the beach and played all day.

It always amazed me how players of the caliber of Don could seem
to any song perfectly from memory!

Here’s the clue …

Don mentioned that it was common to play each song for two hours!

He went on to say that if there were nine players in the group
the guitarist had the opportunity to solo once then back up the
other eight musicians as they played their solos, then you would
get your turn to solo again then accompany the other eight
players again; can you see how you would get to know a song
(certainly the chord changes of a song) with this many
repetitions?

Of course one could never attend any of these informal gatherings
without playing some blues, so without any further ado let’s dive
into some interesting variations of this jam session favorite.

Sometimes you need to feed the soloist a lot of chords to help
build the intensity of the solo and other situations call for
sparse almost static harmonic backgrounds; progression #2
introduces a constant moving harmony in the first four bars then
reverts to four beats to the bar for each of the chords in the
next six bars.

Progression #1: 12 progression in the key of ‘C’

C /// | F /// | C /// | C /// |

F /// | F /// | C /// | C /// |

G7 ///| G7/// | C /// | G7/// || C (last time)

progression #2: variation of original progression

Cmaj7 Dm7 D#m7 Em7 | Fmaj7 Gm7 G#m7 Am7 | Cmaj7 Dm7 D#m7 Em7 |

Gm7 Am7 Bbmaj7 C+7 | Fmaj7 /// | Fm7 /// | Em7 /// | A+7b9 /// |

D9 /// | G+7b9 /// | C /F7 / | Cmaj7/ G+7b9/ || Cmaj7 (last time)

Progressions like these look complicated but take a closer look;
we have created a situation in the first four bars were there
appears to be a lot of random chords, we know they sound good but
why?

Let’s take a closer look …

Cmaj7 Dm7 D#m7 Em7 = bar 1

analysis of bar 1:

chord one: (Cmaj7) original chord

chord two: (Dm7) second chord in the scaletone seventh
harmonization of the key of ‘C’

chord three: (D#m7) chromatic chord movement to chord four

chord four: (Em7) third chord in the scaletone seventh
harmonization of the key of ‘C’

You see as you did deeper each chord sounds good because they
are there for a reason not just random chords.

Next, take a look a bar two; notice how it has exactly the same
underlying structure as bar one only this time beginning on the
Fmaj7 chord instead of Cmaj7: (1)major7,(2)m7, (#2m7) chromatic
movement minor seventh chord, (3)m7.

Keep looking, listening and learning, you will be amazed at what
you will discover!te

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