Blues Forms, Bar by Bar

Four shapes the blues is built on, each declared bar by bar and read in whichever key you pick: which notes of the blues scale sit inside the chord, which add colour, and which rub.

A blues is short enough to count and it repeats, which is what makes it possible to read one bar by bar. This page and the four under it do exactly that. Each form is declared once, as scale degrees rather than chord names, so it has no key of its own: the tables are computed from that declaration in whichever key you choose, and a guard recomputes every cell from raw arithmetic before any of it ships.

The reading asks one question of every bar: where do the six notes of the blues scale land against the chord that bar holds? A note can be a chord tone, one of the four notes of the dominant seventh the band is playing. It can be colour, the ninth or the thirteenth, the two tensions a dominant seventh takes without altering anything. Or it can be a rub: a note sitting a semitone against one the chord is holding. A rub is not a wrong note. It is the sound the style leans on, most famously the flat third, the blue note bent or sung against the major third the band is holding underneath it.

Because the chord moves and the scale does not, the same note changes class from bar to bar. The flat third rubs over the home chord and over the dominant, and becomes the chord's own flat seventh the moment the subdominant arrives. The flat fifth rubs in every bar of every form. The fifth of the key never rubs at all. None of that is typed onto these pages; it falls out of the arithmetic, and the counts below come from the same place.

Where the forms come from

Each form carries the published reference it was read from, printed under its own table, and a form that could not be checked against one is not here. The minor blues and the jazz blues are Jazz Warrior's to declare and are not repeated. Every bar is a dominant seventh, because that is how the blues commonly plays all three of its chords; the rule that sorts the notes is therefore the same in every bar, and it is set out in full below, rows that never fill included.

The four forms, counted

Each declared form, counted: readings of the six blues-scale notes against every bar, by class, and where the flat third belongs or rubs.
Form Bars Chord tones Colour Rubs Flat third belongs in bars
The twelve-bar blues 12 35 3 34 5, 6 and 10
The quick-change twelve-bar 12 35 4 33 2, 5, 6 and 10
The eight-bar blues 8 21 2 25 3 and 4
The sixteen-bar blues 16 47 3 46 9, 10 and 14

The rule, over a dominant seventh

Every bar of every form here is a dominant seventh, so one row of the rule does all the work. It files each of the twelve intervals above the chord's root in exactly one class, and the blues scale lands on ten of them across these forms. The two it never reaches — 3rd and 13th — are listed anyway, because a rule that hid its empty rows would be claiming more than it shows.

The rule over a dominant seventh: every interval above the chord's root, its class, and whether a blues-scale note lands on it anywhere in these forms.
Semitones up Interval Class Reached here
0 root chord tone yes
1 b9 rub yes
2 9th colour yes
3 b3 rub yes
4 3rd chord tone never
5 11th rub yes
6 b5 rub yes
7 5th chord tone yes
8 #5 rub yes
9 13th colour never
10 b7 chord tone yes
11 7th rub yes

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