The Blues Chord Book
Most guitarists play the blues with three or four plain chords and quietly wonder why it doesn’t sound like the records. It’s almost never the picking, and it’s almost never the gear. It’s the chords.
The Blues Chord Book is the chord vocabulary that actually makes a blues sound like the blues — the 9ths, 13ths, the Hendrix 7#9, the sixths and the half-diminished grips — laid out as easy open chords and as compact, moveable “stabs” you can fire off anywhere on the neck. No impossible barre chords. No filler.
Work through it in a single sitting and you’ll have the chords, the 12-bar forms they live in, and a feel for when to reach for each one — enough to comp a blues in any key and actually sound like you mean it.
Download the PDF →What’s inside
- 11 essential blues chord types — dominant 7, 9, 13, 7#9, 7b9, 7sus4 and 6, plus minor 7, 9, 6 and 7b5
- Two ways to play every one — easy open chords down at the nut, and compact moveable stabs for anywhere on the neck
- The 12-bar forms — standard, quick-change and minor blues, mapped out bar by bar
- Four dressed-up blues — funk, soul, jazz and a fully extended standard, in four keys; steal them whole or just lift the ideas
- A substitution guide — exactly when to reach for a 9, a 13 or a 7#9 instead of a plain 7, and where each one fits in the form
Who it’s for
Blues players who know their pentatonic box cold but feel stuck on the rhythm side. Anyone whose blues sounds a bit flat and can’t quite say why. Players who want the real chord vocabulary without wading through a theory textbook to get to it.
Once these chords are under your fingers, the next step is making your solos follow them — playing the changes instead of running one box over the whole tune. That’s exactly what my book Blues Soloing Maps: Playing the Changes is for.
Blues Soloing Maps →