Improvising With the 12 Bar Blues

The 12 Bar Blues is a widely used chord progression, and an excellent choice for getting started with improvisation. 

If you're looking for a chord progression most guitarists will be comfortable improvising over, look no further!

First of all, we're going be playing in Swing Timing, make sure you understand the idea before you proceed.

The 12 Bar Blues is based around the "1-4-5-1" Chord Progression, which we will cover in more detail soon. This means we're working with just 3 chords, and for now, we will use only the 2-finger Power Chord Shape.

So, we'll be playing 8th notes in swing all the way through, and using the same chord shape. The only thing that needs to change is your hand position! Try playing through it now.

Once you're comfortable with playing this, congrats! You're now ready to provide a rhythm over which another guitar player can improvise. But what about improvising for ourselves?

For now, we will use our Minor Blues Pentatonic when working with the 12 Bar Blues. The backing track we just learned is in the key of A, so that will be our root note. That means we want to start our scale on the 5th fret.

Warm up by playing the scale up and down. Try playing it with swing, as well.

Once that's done, you're ready to go! Often, people feel unsure about trying out improvisation. But at this stage, you're just looking to experiment with the sound you can create and see what happens. Don't overthink it, make some noise.

Play the Youtube video below when you're ready to go, and try playing along with it all the way through.

Now that you've given it a try for yourself - here are some simple pointers and ideas you can try for yourself. Read this over and try improvising one more time with some or all of these in mind.

• Try starting or ending your phrases on a root note. This will keep your playing grounded in the key we are centered around. You can think of returning to the root note like coming home.

• Try focusing on the higher strings. With the rhythm focused on the low end of the guitar, it's often a good idea to place the melody above it.

• Make silence part of your sound. Many improvisers feel the need to constantly be playing. This can actually be counterproductive! Try spending about 50% of your time quiet - this gives the music room to breathe and makes your playing sound more interesting when it is present. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

• Keep it simple! Often, the catchiest riffs are the ones that are slow enough and simple enough for someone to hum along with.

• Repetition is not boring. If you really like something you just played, try playing it again! Bonus points for playing it again over a different chord. A really neat trick is to play a riff a couple times over, and then to play it once more but change the ending. This leads to a feeling of surprise in the mind of the audience.

• Explore! Spend some time with each note and see how it makes you feel. Notice how strange the tritone sounds if you play it exclusively. Go ahead and try some notes that are outside the scale. Do you like any of them?

Improvising is a deep topic, but now we've gotten your feet wet. I hope you can see now that it's actually relatively simple to create something for yourself.

Like everything else we talk about here, the best way to improve is simply to spend time working on it every day, or as often as you'd like. Don't worry if you don't sound how you want to at first - it can be a lot to take in.

Keep at it and we will cover many more ideas and scenarios for improvisation soon!