Blues Guitar Chords
Most players think the blues is three chords. It isn’t — it’s three positions with a whole vocabulary of chords that can go in each one. That’s the difference between a blues that sounds like a beginner exercise and one that sounds like the real thing: not the I, IV and V, but which dominant you reach for, and the 9ths, 13ths and altered colours you slide in to make it growl.
This tool lays that vocabulary out. Pick a chord and see exactly what’s inside it — the notes, the intervals, the b7 that makes it bluesy and the #9 that makes it bite — then see it mapped across the neck. It’s how you move past playing the blues to actually speaking it.
It’s free, nothing to install, and it works on your phone right next to the guitar.
The Blues Chord Book
Open chords, moveable stabs & the 12-bar forms.
How to use it
Pick a chord from the blues vocabulary and the tool breaks it open — root, third, fifth, the flat seventh that defines a dominant, and the extensions that give it character. Each tone tells you what it adds. Then watch where the notes fall on the neck so you can actually grab the shape. Work through the dominant 9ths, 13ths, the sharp-nine “Hendrix” chord and the altered voicings, and you’ll start hearing where each one belongs in a progression.
More than three chords
A twelve-bar blues is built on three dominant chords — but “dominant” is a family, not a single chord. A plain 7th, a 9th, a 13th, a 7#9 and a 7b9 will all sit in the same bar, and choosing between them is most of what makes a blues player sound like themselves. The flat seventh is the note that turns a major chord bluesy; the upper extensions are the colour; the altered tensions are the grit. Once you can see a blues chord as its intervals rather than a memorised grip, you can voice it your own way, anywhere on the neck.
Who it’s for
Players who know a twelve-bar but want it to sound less plain. Anyone moving from open-position blues into jazzier, hornier voicings. Guitarists who want to understand why a chord sounds like the blues instead of just copying the shape.
This tool gives you the chords. Blues Soloing Maps: Playing the Changes gives you the lines to play over them — the lead vocabulary that turns rhythm playing into real blues soloing.
Get the book →