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Knowing your twelve bar blues chord progressions is one of the best ways to get a handle on playing guitar. Once you understand the basic principles of blues guitar, you can start to experiment with improvising within the chord progressions and to put your own mark on the music.

The twelve bar blues chord progression is very widely used in pop and rock music. If you have listened to and tried to play some blues songs, you will understand how popular this basic chord sequence is. In playing blues guitar you take the main chord of the song you are playing, which is called the “tonic”, the fifth step of the scale – the “dominant”, and the chord below the dominant, the “subdominant”, or fourth step. So if you are playing a song in the key of E your tonic chord is E, the subdominant is A and the dominant is B. If you are playing in the key of A, your chords are A, D and E.

In musical notation your chord sequence is commonly written in Roman numerals. In the case of the twelve bar blues chord progression, it will be written as I IV V. Using this notation you can tell which chords you will be using in any key.

So let’s look at how the twelve bar blues chord progression actually progresses. Well, the first four bars use the tonic chord, in the fifth and sixth you play the subdominant, in the seventh and eight you will play the tonic again, in bar nine it’s the dominant, in bar ten it’s the subdominant and in the eleventh and twelfth bars it’s the tonic, or in this bar the dominant seventh chord is usually used to prepare for the tonic chord to begin the progression again.

The fact is that the seventh chord is used a lot in blues music rather than just the straight major chord. This will make the chord sequence in the key of E look like this:

E7 E7 E7 E7

A7 A7 E7 E7

B7 A7 E7 E7

Or you could just play the seventh chords in the fourth and twelfth bars like this:

E E E E7

A A E E

B A E E7

Or you could play all major chords except for the subdominant and the final bar:

E E E E

A7 A7 E E

B A7 E E7

So there you have a couple of variations in the twelve bar blues chord progression already. Once you have the feel of the progression using open chords, you can try experimenting with the barre chord and power chord versions of the basic chords.

Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all the resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.

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Electric guitars are used in various forms and styles of music including pop, country, rock and roll, jazz or blues. These guitars are used largely in rock music, and are a bit more forgiving than are acoustic guitars. Depending on the venue, electric guitars are one of the most common guitars used in the 20th century.

The strings used on electric guitars are steel strings as on acoustic guitars, but usually of a much lighter gauge so they are generally easier on your fingers. The guitars themselves are much heavier than are acoustic guitars. The wood is heavier and the electronic parts on the inside add weight to the guitar, as well. While the specific wood type for the body, neck and fingerboard is less of a factor in electric guitars, the wood chosen for a particular electric guitar does contribute its distinctive sound and as well as the feel of the guitar in your hands and even in your style of playing. The neck of the electric guitar must also take more stress due to the heavy body of the guitar.

Because of the type of strings used on the electric guitar, they are considered to be easier to play. The lighter gauge of the strings for the electric guitar makes picking and strumming much simpler. The trade-off, of course, is the weight of the guitar and ability to be heard by larger audiences.

Electric guitars are slightly more expensive than are acoustic guitars but quality electric guitars can be found in the lower price ranges, as well. The important thing to remember in planning to purchase an electric guitar is that they only sound good with an amplifier, so you must count on purchasing one of those as well as the guitar.

While various historians would argue about the time frame, electric guitars became popular in the 1960’s and 1970’s. At that point, rock n’ roll was the prevailing culture in the world of music. Electric guitars became a necessity in the competition with the amplified instruments used by jazz orchestras. They quickly became popular, even though there were some difficulties with their construction. The body of the electric guitar would vibrate because of the amplified sounds that came through the speakers, to which they were connected, causing what we know as feed-back. Electric guitars don’t work with microphones, but with special pickups on the body of the guitar that senses the movement of strings. These pickups also tend to pick up the various electrical noises of the room, giving the guitar a bit of a “hum” which can be a very large or very small depending on where the guitar is being played. Several different designs for electric guitars were tried and left unused because of this difficulty in the decades before the 70’s. However, the Les Paul by Gibson and the Stratocaster by Fender rose above the other models to help eliminate some of these difficulties and secured their place in electric guitar history.

There are many types of electric guitars: solid body, hollow body and metal body. The solid body electric guitar is actually carved from hardwood and has a lacquer finish. The guitars with the metal bodies are affected by the “weight relief” holes that are bored into the solid metal guitars or they are chambered metal so that the guitar will not weigh so much. The hollow bodied electric guitars are said to add resonance and sustain to the guitar while being lighter in weight for the guitarists handling of the instrument. The hollow body electric guitars have the pick-ups mounted in such a way that they convert the combination of the string and the instrument’s body vibration into the electrical signal sent to the amplifier.

Electric guitars are great instruments to have around. They can be played for large audiences and their versatility of style is excellent. Earphones are a great addition to the guitar and the amplifier for the student who lives in the house with others that don’t necessarily want to hear the instrument played all night or all day. With this one upgrade, the electric guitar is a great addition to the other instruments in my household!

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Every man must have had the craving to learn how to play the guitar during his teenage years. This is only normal when growing up, especially in an age where rock music and pop culture are both prevalent and plays a significant part in shaping someone’s personality.

Many individuals learned how to play the guitar through friends. It is a good thing now that there is the Internet where one can browse through thousands or millions of web pages and websites that offer nothing but guitar lessons.

Perhaps the very first thing that a guitar player should know, aside from the parts of the guitar, is how to read guitar music the right way. As we all know, this can only be made possible if the player knows how to read guitar chords from a chart. This is the only way that one person can read through the tabs, play them, and see if the guitar music is right or wrong.

Learning how to read guitar chords is the only way to learn how to play guitar. Being able to do so saves someone the hassle of looking for another person just to ask for information. In time, after learning how to read guitar music, one can easily say that what he has on the magazine guitar chart for a certain song is wrong. He can then move on to changing it and in turn, tech his friends the right chords for playing a song.

The standard way of displaying the correct guitar chord is through a guitar diagram. A guitar chord diagram is made of a drawn square or rectangle with six lines, representing the six strings of a guitar. The squares are segregated into bars and these are the representations of the guitar frets. The way guitar chords are displayed is inverted, as if looking at the mirror. Keep in mind that at the left hand section of the drawing, you will find a thick line, which symbolizes the n of the guitar’s neck, where the tuning nuts are.

The places where you need to press the strings are symbolized by dots. If a dot is found at the second fret at the third string, this means that you need to press that string at that exact location. There is also a proper way of pressing the strings in terms of what fingers to use. On top of the drawing, you will see numbers form 1-4. The number on top of a dot tells you what finger to use. This means that if the number two is used or a dot located at the second fret on the third string, you have to use your middle finger to press that chord at that location.

How to read guitar music may not be an easy challenge to many. This is more aggravated by the fact that for beginners, they may think they are pressing the right chord but they cannot produce the right sound. Patience is always a key to learning how to play the guitar. No one can really learn how to play the guitar overnight. It may take days to master even just a single chord.

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