Hi There,

Thanks for reading my blogs so far.

In previous bogs on the blues we’ve understood how the blues works in ‘Understanding the blues’ and also how to add dominant 7 arpeggios to your improvisation.

Now for blues progressions the most commonly used shapes are your E and A Dominant 7 shapes below:

Now to spice up your typical blues progressions you can now introduce your funky sounding dominant 9th and 13th chords (the reason there’s no 11th chords is that they don’t sound particularly great!)

There are only really 2 shapes for each that I suggest below:

And for the dominant 13 (note due to the the fact that the chord has 7 notes 1,3,5,b7,9,11,13 one/2 intervals are left out):

So now you can use these different dominant chords as an when you like to give your blues playing some variety.

Many thanks for reading and hope you’ve found this blog useful

You can find other useful tips on twitter @jsmusicschool

ROCK N ROLL

James