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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.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/music-articles/twelve-bar-blues-chord-progressions-1090712.html

Playing lead guitar seems like the next logical step to getting some skills in rhythm playing. You might need to focus more on the quality of your playing when you switch to single note solos and lead guitar licks. To start playing lead guitar you will need to be familiar with the notes on the guitar fretboard. This might seem like a big job but it only takes a few minutes a day of finding the notes and playing them in all positions.

You will need to add sessions of alternate picking using scales to your daily guitar practice. Your picking technique is the basis of your lead guitar playing but there are other techniques like string bending and skipping as well as hammer-ons, pull-offs and string tapping.

If you are a rock or blues guitarist you will need to know the minor pentatonic and the blues scale. The blues scale is only the minor pentatonic scale with an added flattened fifth. You can also add a flattened third or seventh.

If you can make or download a twelve bar blues backing track to play in front of, just play the notes of the scale in any order, experimenting with your blue notes. You will gradually get the feel of playing solos as you start to break free from the scale structure and use licks to make your guitar speak.

Another way of practicing playing lead guitar is to focus on the notes you find in the chords. Start by making sure you have the notes firmly in your head, and play them in any order with your backing track playing.

You could devote some time each day to discovering playing lead guitar using arpeggios. This simply involves fingering chord shapes and playing them as single notes. You simply hold the chord shape and play the strings up from the sixth and down from the first, then in random order.

If you have not already learnt to read guitar tabs, you should start now. It only takes half an hour to get the basic idea, and learning tab will allow you to tap into all the lead guitar solos that other guitarists have written in tab and shared on the internet. You can find tabs on tablature archive sites, and you could also check out forums to see if the members post tabs of their work. And don’t forget that guitar magazines are still alive and well, so take a look at any regular tab features they might be running.

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.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/music-articles/playing-lead-guitar-the-first-steps-1013732.html