Blues FAQ

Questions, Answered

What is a blue note?

A pitch the blues bends away from the major scale. The usual suspects are the third and the seventh, pushed flat or left hovering somewhere between flat and natural, and — less often — the fifth, pushed flat. Sung or played over a chord that holds the natural version of the same note, it produces a deliberate rub, and that rub is most of what people mean when they say something sounds bluesy.

On a fretted instrument the in-between pitches are reached by bending a string; on a harmonica by bending a reed; on a piano, which cannot bend at all, by pressing two neighbouring keys at once. The blues scale gathers the flattened third, fifth and seventh into one set, but no scale chart can show how far a singer lets a note sag.

What are the twelve bars of a twelve-bar blues made of?

Three lines of four bars each. In the most common verse shape the singer states a line, repeats it, then answers it with a third line — and each line gets four bars, which is where the twelve comes from. Underneath, the harmony moves from the home chord to the chord a fourth above it and back, then to the chord a fifth above and home again, with dominant seventh chords in all three places.

That is the common shape, not the only one: eight-bar and sixteen-bar blues exist, and the chords inside the twelve bars vary from player to player. The forms pages read each of them bar by bar, in any key, and say which notes of the blues scale are chord tones in each bar, which add colour and which rub.

Which seat should a beginner start in?

The one you will practise. The guitar is the most common way in because it can carry the rhythm and the answering phrase on its own; the bass is the seat every band is short of; the harmonica is cheap and portable and goes straight to the heart of the bent note. See the seats for what each one carries.

Whichever you pick, the technique lives on that instrument's own Warrior site rather than here. This site's job starts once you can make the sound: what your seat does while the form goes round, and where the blue notes sit against it.

What makes a shuffle feel different from a straight beat?

Where the second note of each beat lands. In a straight feel each beat splits into two even halves; in a shuffle the first part of the beat is held longer and the second is pushed late, closer to the next beat. The chords can be identical and the song still sounds like a different piece of music, because every seat in the band phrases against that lopsided pulse.

Do I need to read music?

No. The blues has been learned by ear for as long as it has existed, and the vocabulary on this site — chord names, bars, the notes of a scale — describes what you hear rather than replacing it. The form is short and it repeats, which is exactly what makes it the best music there is for training your ear to find the chord changing underneath you.