Hi everyone! Welcome to this tutorial on the minor blues.
The minor blues is much like our beloved standard blues in many ways. It contains 3 primary chords, is generally 12 bars long and doesn't follow our standard ideas of music theory - in other words it's more of a feeling or sound than a theoretical musical idea.
Unlike our standard or major blues which contains dominant 7th or major type chords, our minor blues contains only minor chords (usually minor 7th chords for a jazzier sound).
We'll be looking at a minor blues in the key of A. By doing so we come across 3 minor chords necessary to create our blues sound. They are:
Am, Dm and Em. In a blues we always have a I chord, a IV chord and a V chord. Our Am chord is the I chord, Dm the IV chord and Em the V. For the moment don't worry about why we name the chords that way - we can save this for another tutorial. It's just good to have this knowledge now as it's something you'll hear people referring to a lot.
Throughout the course of this tutorial we'll be gradually altering and adding to our chord sequence ending up with a rather sophisticated blues progression moving through five different permutations. As such this tutorial is categorized as both beginner and intermediate level. Feel free to skip to the intermediate level tutorials if the first few chord progressions are too easy.
Move on to the next video and we'll look at how we can combine these chords to create our minor blues!