More 12 Bar Blues in A

Description

In this Tutorial Series we are going to expand upon our 12 Bar Blues in A!

Let's start by fleshing out our rhythmic pattern a little bit. As in many "blues" songs the rhythm is an eight-note triplet pattern. That means you will have 3 ("triplets") evenly spaced counts occur on every beat. This leads to a background counting pattern of:

1 & uh 2 & uh 3 & uh 4 & uh (repeat) for every measure.

In the previous lessons (1-4 of this tutorial series) we only played notes on the beat "number", skip the "&" and then play notes on the "uh". That lead to this typical "swing" type rhythm:

1 & uh 2 & uh 3 & uh 4 & uh

This time we are going to also play notes on some of the "&"s! Like this:

1 & uh 2 & uh 3 & uh 4 & uh

So we wind up with this basic pattern that adds a little "extra flavor" and variety to the line: