Today’s Chord, as a Bar of the Blues

The network’s pick for today, played the way a blues plays every bar — as a dominant seventh — then read as a home bar, a subdominant bar and a dominant bar.

Today’s shared chord, played as the dominant seventh a blues puts on every bar, then read three ways, as a home bar, a subdominant bar and a dominant bar, with each key’s blues scale sorted into chord tones, colour and rubs.

How the reading works

Every Warrior site draws the same chord each day from one shared seed, and the instrument sites show where the fingers go. Here the pick is played the way a blues plays every bar of its forms, as a dominant seventh on the same root, and each of its own notes is read against that bar by the rule the form pages use: chord tone, colour or rub. A major chord or a dominant seventh sits inside the bar as it stands. A minor chord brings its minor third, which rubs against the bar's major third, the blue third sung against the band. A ninth or a sixth adds colour, and a major seventh rubs.

One chord, three bars

In the twelve-bar blues a dominant seventh can be the home bar in its own key, the subdominant bar in the key a fifth above, and the dominant bar in the key a fourth above. The chord is the same all three times; the blues scale is not, so the same bar collects a different set of rubs each time. The table under today’s pick shows all three, with the bars of the twelve-bar each one fills.

Where the pick comes from

One seed, shared by every site in the network, turning over once a day. Nothing is personalised and nothing is chosen by hand: the date decides, the same for everyone. The calculation runs in your browser against your own local date, which is why this text describes the method rather than naming a chord; if it is still yesterday where you are, you are looking at yesterday’s chord, and that is the right one.