The 12 Bar Blues is the most common blues form. It literally means that there are 12 ‘bars’ or ‘measures’ contained within each 12-bar sequence of a blues song.  The blues are written in 4/4 time which means that each measure contains 4 beats.  These 12 bars can be repeated many times, with as many modifications as you like.  The form that you will be exploring in this course is known as the STANDARD 12-BAR BLUES PROGRESSION.
To illustrate the 12-bar sequence in the simplest form, each box below represents one bar and the chord that is to be played within that measure. Each bar starts with the chord name which represents beat one, with the 3 slashes representing beats 2, 3 & 4 as illustrated below:
It is a good idea to memorise this chord progression without having to look at the bar illustrations so that you can play with confidence later. You will begin by playing the 12 bar chord progression with a following strumming patterns, starting off at 70BPM.
The final bar of G can also be switched to several variations and is known as the turnaround, more of which you will explore later.

Now try practicing along with the audio files to help build your speed up to 100 BPM. The blues is commonly played between 70 – 100BPM, to be more precise, Andante to Andante Moderato.
Click on the button below to download an MP3 of all 3 speeds together so that you can practice offline. 
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