Lately I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the word, “key,” as it applies to the blues.<\/p>\n
For example, when we say a blues is “in the key of E,” it’s not, really. That’s just something we say. And if you’re new to the blues, and new to music, in general, this can be pretty confusing.<\/p>\n
So let’s start with the basics first:<\/p>\n
Simply put, a key<\/em> is a collection of notes that play well together. They are in no particular order, which is all that separates them from a scale, but one of the notes in the key, the root<\/em>, is the most important.<\/p>\n Keys can be major, or minor, and they (basically) work the same so I’ll only discuss major. (For all you theory junkies that want to pontificate on how minor keys aren’t actually exactly the same as major keys, save it. I know, and I’m skipping that because it doesn’t matter for the sake of this discussion.)<\/em><\/p>\n Imagine back to when you were a kid, and you might have had those little Alphabet blocks – each block had a letter on it, and you had 26 of them, one for each letter…<\/p>\n Well, in a key, you’ll only have 8, and the most important one, the root, you’ll have 2 of those.<\/p>\n So you might have a C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and another C… and if you put all of those blocks in a bag, that would be the key of C (major.)<\/p>\n And I might tell you that those notes in that bag are the notes you’re allowed to play with.<\/p>\n You can’t play with the Bb – that’s not in your key… and you can’t play with the F#, that’s not in your key either.<\/p>\n Well, let’s say you take the notes out of the bag for the key of C… and you put them on the floor in order, starting with the root (the one we decided was most important.)<\/p>\n You’d get:<\/p>\n C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C<\/strong><\/p>\n on the floor, in that order. And that, is a C Major Scale. So really, the only difference between the key of C, and the C Major Scale, is that the scale goes in order. Otherwise, they are the same notes.<\/p>\n Nope, not even a little bit… blues doesn’t follow traditional rules.<\/p>\n Let’s say we’re playing a blues “in the key of C.” We’d have 3 chords, C7, F7, and G7.<\/p>\n If we break those chords apart into their individual notes, we have <\/p>\n C, E, G, Bb (C7), F A C Eb (F7), and G B D F (G7).<\/p>\n Putting those all together we get<\/p>\n C, D, Eb, E, F, G, A, Bb, B, C – which is too many notes, for one thing. And secondly, you never have Eb and E together, or Bb and B together. In a key, you can only have one of each letter (it might have a sharp or flat, but there will be only one.)<\/p>\n That, my friend, is why the minor blues scale is used. It doesn’t fit perfectly over any one of those chords – but it gets pretty close to all of them, and it’s a sound we’ve grown to love, so we use it.<\/p>\n In a blues, the first chord (of the 12 bar blues form) is the “key,” even though the key actually changes with every chord change.<\/p>\n I try very hard to say, “a blues in C,” instead of “the key of C,” because “key,” in that context, is used incorrectly. But it’s a subtle thing and sometimes I get lazy because we speak incorrectly so commonly.<\/p>\n The main thing here is to remember that, by and large, the classic, diatonic major scale has no place in blues. I never use it, BB King never used it, and I’ve never met a blues player that used it and had it work out.<\/p>\n Always remember that when you play a blues, fundamentally each chord is its own key. But you don’t have to think about it that way while you solo, that would be really<\/em> hard.<\/p>\n That is why we have a blues scale, and why we love it so much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lately I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the word, “key,” as it applies to the blues. For example, when we say a blues is “in the key of E,” it’s not, really. That’s just something we say. And if you’re new to the blues, and new to music, in general, this can be pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7257,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7256\/revisions\/7257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Then What’s A Scale?<\/h4>\n
But That’s Not Blues, Is It?<\/h4>\n
So What?<\/h4>\n