This article shows beginner guitar players the 12 bar blues progression and how to play it with simple open position blues chords. Blues guitar is great fun to play. This article shows you the simple chords and basic blues song structure you can use to play many thousands of songs.

Learning to play the blues is not only great fun, it also gives you valuable skills you can use in other styles such as rock, soul, R&B, funk and jazz. Blues guitar uses distinctive sounding chords called dominant 7th chords. These are denoted by the number 7 following the chord name.

The dominant 7th chord is simply a normal major or minor chord with a 7th note two frets below the root note added. For example, you add a D note to an E major chord to form an E7, a G note to an A chord gives you A7, and so on.

You can add the 7th note to many chords by finding a root note and changing the fingering to play the note two frets below it. The chord diagrams below show you easy open blues chords in the key of A major.

E7            A7                D7

e 0|---|---|  0|---|---|---|    |---|-3-|
B 0|---|---|   |---|-2-|---|    |-1-|---|
G  |-1-|---|  0|---|---|---|    |---|-2-|
D 0|---|---|   |---|-1-|---|   0|---|---|
A  |---|-2-|  0|---|---|---|   x|---|---|
E 0|---|---|  x|---|---|---|   x|---|---|