Talk:Twelve bar blues

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The twelve bar blues, when played on guitars and basses are generally played in the home chords, or chords with several open strings': E-A-B7 or A-D-E7 Keyboardists may prefer C-F-G7 or G-C-D7.

POV: The 12-bar blues are easy and fun to play!

Quinobi 19:44, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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[edit] Ideas for improvement

As I'm a new user I thought i'd place some ideas here for a period, in order for any disagreements to be resolved before i go and make changes etc

1. I'm not sure I agree with directly linking the twelve bar blues progression and 4/4 time per se. Idioms which make extensive use of the twelve bar blues (ie including most "blues" styles) do use 4/4 time almost almost exclusively. But the twelve bar form has been extensively used in many styles! And, in some cases, other time signatures/rhythmic schemes have been involved... (ie All Blues, Miles Davis in 3/4) This in no way deemphasises the fact that it is a twelve bar blues, you know it and feel it. I don't think you can say that "twelve bar blues=4/4 time". And now that I think of it, most traditional "blues" styles use 12/8, anyway!

3. My primary concern is with the jargonesque explanation of the essential characteristics of the form. I think a more useful approach would be to simplify it into its essence, something that I do and explain in layman's terms for students on a (very) regular basis. In other words I think the "call - variation - response" essence kind of thing needs to be drawn out as a priority. From this the technicalities and variations can be discussed. The more obscure (classical?) theoretical references seem more like an appendix or final note?:

While the blues is most often considered to be in sectional strophic form with a verse-refrain pattern, it may also be considered as an extension of the variational chaconne procedure. Van der Merwe (1989) considers it developed in part specifically from the American Gregory Walker though the conventional account would consider hymns as the provider of the blues repeating chord progression or harmonic formulae (Middleton 1990.

Yeah. Despite having an extensive music background (B.Mus w first class honours), i'm pretty lost in this paragraph. still useful info, but needs to be prefaced w something more approachable?

I'll leave this here for a while before I pull anything...

Wow! Its so damn rubbish!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Aurgi 12:55, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Probably a good idea to wait. I usually don't use my own ignorance as a guide to what should be deleted from Wikipedia. Hyacinth 22:46, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

sorry, i don't understand what you mean... explain? Aurgi 07:34, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Notation

Are there any guidelines anywhere concerning how to represent chord progressions within Wikipedia? If not there should be. It would make things a lot clearer if everyone used the same system. In this one article there are three different methods used: numbers (1 4 5) roman numerals (I IV V) and names (T S D.)

The roman numeral system is probably the way to go, it's the way musicians write things out when dealing with relative harmony.

Also, harmonic rhythm is often confusing or ambiguous in a lot of the articles I've seen. Sometimes a chord symbol represents a measure and other times a single beat. The use of bar lines is probably a good idea.

Text sucks for conveying music notation but some measure of consistency would make these articles a lot more useful and readable. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ned5000 (talk • contribs) 04:20, 29 December 2006 (UTC).

I'll agree with the claim that text sucks for conveying music notation... but since the music itself often includes text, in the form of lyrics, a compromise might be to expand the article by using a well-known song (though finding one that's familiar to everyone will be an impossible challenge), and breaking it down line by line. To the extent that the song is well-known enough, this would allow readers to get the gist of what the textual explanations are trying to do. There are some good examples of 12-bar based songs already, but one could question whether the average reader will have heard the "Empty Bed Blues," for example, as often as more popular works. C d h 12:34, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Basic Is Basic

The The Blues Chord Progression section begins:

A basic example of the progression would look like this, using T to indicate the tonic, S for the subdominant, and D for the dominant, and representing one chord per measure:

T T T T 
S S T T
D S T T

Nice try at explaining the progression, but the terms tonic, subdominant, and dominant are not in common parlance, at least among the musicians I play/perform/teach with. As pointed out previously, the roman numeral notation system would be more universally understood. That aside, the above example is not basic, and not the place to begin discussing this progression and its variations. Rather the following progression (using the original notation) is basic:

...the tenth bar [stays] in dominant, yielding this:

T T T T
S S T T
D D T T

IMO, all twelve-bar blues progressions are variations of this minimalist form. But your mileage may vary.

What about this one:

C F C C7

F F C A7

D G7 C C

Ortolan88 17:38, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

AlvinMGO 14:13, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Either Nashville notation (1 4 5) or Roman numerals (I IV V) would be preferable to the obscure T S D. In the meantime, I'm going to cop that handy guide to common chords from the top of this page and stick it in the article somewhere. Ortolan88 15:54, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I started trying to fix this, but I'm just a drummer who can play extremely simply blues in C on the piano, so somebody better than me needs to jump in here and straighten this all out. Ortolan88 17:38, 6 April 2007 (UTC)