Blues Guitar Lesson: 3 Note Blues Chords

Traditionally guitarists learn chords in one of two ways; either they learn generic chord shapes from a chord book or pick up the garden variety chord forms from watching a friend play.

This entrance into the world of harmony is fine if the player only wants to dabble in guitar and remain a musical "fringe dweller" but once the guitarist wants to get serious and stylize their playing the "standard" chord shapes fall short of the mark.

The authentic blues sound is created by using chords that have been stripped down to their basic chord sound, the concept is to leave out all the unnecessary notes so that the essential notes can "speak".

When blues guitarists play these "lean" voiced chords the music can "breath", the listener can clearly hear all the instruments in the recording or live performance; everybody in the band has their own musical "space".

The problem is that the majority of guitarists unintentionally play far too many notes in their chords and because they do not know how to pare their chords back they clog up the sonic landscape.

How To Create "Lean" 3 Note Blues Chords

Step 1 - Use Dominant 7th chords as substitute for major chords.

In many instances blues chords progressions are written as major chords whereas blues players generally prefer the sound of dominant seventh chords to create a "restless", wandering sound.

Written as...

BLUES: Key of G (typical version)

G /// |G /// | G /// |G ///
C /// |C /// | G /// |G ///
D /// |D /// | G /// |G ///

Played as...

BLUES: Key of G (dominant 7th version)

G7 /// |G7 /// | G7 /// |G7 ///
C7 /// |C7 /// | G7 /// |G7 ///
D7 /// |D7 /// | G7 /// |G7 ///

Step 2 - Look at the "spelling" for each chord.

Music is a language, a universal language, and just as in our English language where we communicate our ideas with others by selecting certain letters from our alphabet then combine these letters to form words that are in turn connected together to create sentences our music language has an equivalent system...

English language = music equivalent
---------------- ---------------
alphabet = scale

word = chord

sentence = chord progression

Each chord has it's own unique spelling; here is the spelling of the chords used in our blues in "G"

G7 = G - B - D - F

C7 = C - E - G - Bb

D7 = D - F# - A - C

The formula for spelling dominant 7th chords is: 1 - 3 - 5 - b7

By that we mean that if we were to take the first, third, fifth and flattened seventh notes of a scale we would arrive at the correct spelling.

Example

Key of G major = G - A - B - C - D - E - F# - G

If we select the first - G

Third - B

Fifth - D

and Flatten the seventh note - F

We would have the spelling for G7 = G - B - D - F

Step 3 - Drop the 5th.

Now that you know the notes of each chord leave the fifth of each chord out.

Every chord contains certain "essential" notes, these notes contain the essence of the chord, you can leave other notes out and just play these "essential" notes and everyone will still hear the flavor of the chord, in fact dropping the non-essential notes the chord will sound better!

The three note version of our chords would now contain only these notes...

G7 = G - B - F

C7 = C - E - Bb

D7 = D - F# - C

And look like this on the guitar...

G7
-x--
-x--
-4--B (3)
-3--F (b7)
-x--
-3--G (1)

C7
-x--
-x--
-3--Bb(b7)
-2--E (3)
-3--C (1)
-x--

D7
-x--
-x--
-5--C (b7)
-4--F# (3)
-5--D (1)
-x--

If you are playing with a bass player you can even leave the root note out and thereby create 2 note blues chords by playing only the 3rd and 7th notes in each chord.