The Seats in a Blues Band

Six seats, two of them with chord and scale references on this site, and what each one is responsible for while the form goes round.

A blues band can be a single singer with a guitar or a full stage, and the jobs do not change with the size of it. Somebody has to keep the pulse, somebody has to say which chord the bar is on, and somebody has to answer the singer in the space left after each line. In a small band one player covers several of those jobs at once; in a big one each seat takes one and leaves the rest alone.

None of these instruments is ours. The guitar and the bass each have a deep home elsewhere in the Warrior Network — the site that covers the whole family, its tunings, its technique and its gear — and every reference page below carries the door there. What you get here instead is the blues reading: the same chord or scale, framed by what this seat does with it while a bar of the blues goes by.

Pick a seat

Guitar

The rhythm under each sung line and the answering phrase in the gap the singer leaves after it. Chords for the rhythm hand, scales for the answer, and a neck map for finding where each bend begins.

EADGBE

Bass

A repeating figure under every bar that moves with each change of chord and tells the rest of the band the change has arrived. Chord tones to build it from, and the scales its steps come out of.

EADG

Every reference page, seat by seat

Four sections per seat. Chords and scales run to every root and every quality; the keys page gives each key's diatonic chords; the explorer maps the whole neck.

Guitar — the rhythm and the answer

Bass — the figure under every bar

Four seats without a reference section

Four more seats turn up in blues bands all the time, and none of them gets a chord or scale section here. The reason is the same for all four and it is structural: every diagram on this site is drawn from the network's shared fretted-instrument registry, and none of these four is a fretted instrument.

Piano

A rolling left hand that never lets the pulse drop, and right-hand figures that press neighbouring keys together to get at the pitches a keyboard has no key for. Keyboards are modelled in the network — by a different package, with a different shape, and taught in full by a different sister site.

Harmonica

The second voice after the singer, usually played cross-harp — a harmonica pitched a fourth above the song, so a C harp for a blues in G — with draw notes bent down into pitches the reeds do not sound on their own. No registry anywhere in the network models a harmonica, so there is no sister site to send you to for one.

Voice

The line the whole form is built to carry — stated, often stated again, then answered by a third line that closes the verse. Everything else in the band is arranged to leave room for it.

Drums

The shuffle or the straight backbeat that settles the feel before anyone has played a note of the form. Which of the two a song gets changes how every other seat phrases, even when the chords are identical.