Every lesson so far has been in A. That was a convenience, not a fact about the blues, and it has one bad side effect: it is possible to finish a course like this able to play in exactly one key. So the last thing to do is move, and the only honest test of whether you learned anything is whether it still works when the frets are different.
We are in G. Nothing below is new.
The box you have played since Part 2
Box 1 covers frets 3–6 and holds twelve notes.
This position covers frets 3 to 6, and every note of G Minor Pentatonic lies under one hand there. Five positions like it cover the whole neck, and this is the first of them.
Same shape, same fingering, same five notes under the same fingers. The only thing that changed is where it starts — two frets lower than you are used to, because the root on the sixth string moved from the fifth fret to the third. That is the entire adjustment.
And the blue third still does what it did
B♭ bends up over G7 B♭ bends up over G7 B♭ bends up over G7 B♭ bends up over G7 B♭ rests over C7 B♭ rests over C7 B♭ bends up over G7 B♭ bends up over G7 B♭ leans onto A over D7 B♭ rests over C7 B♭ bends up over G7 B♭ leans onto A over D7
Read the row: it bends up over G7, rests over C7 and leans onto A over D7. A filled disc is a note you can stop on, a tick under it leans onto the note below and a tick over it bends up into the note above.
Read the sentence under it and compare it with the one you read in Part 3. It bends up over the I, rests over the IV and leans over the V — the same three answers in the same order, because those answers were never about A. They were about the distance between your note and the chord, and distances do not care which fret they start on.
The whole thing, once through
Play an intro over the last four bars, then a chorus of the head — the riff, straight, so the listener knows where they are. Then three choruses of solo: the first low and spare, the second climbing through the joins, the third at the top with the unison bend in it. Then the band drops out.
The stop-time chorus
Band · twelve-bar blues in G · shuffle · 84 beats a minute
A band plays the twelve-bar blues in G, shuffled, at 84 beats a minute: G7, G7, G7, G7, C7, C7, G7, G7, D7, C7, G7, D7.
The band hits the first beat of each of the first four bars and leaves the rest to you, then plays through from bar 5. The bass walks each chord from its root: 1, 3, 5, 6, ♭7, and back down.
Four bars where the band plays one hit each and the rest is yours, then it comes back in and plays the form out. Stop-time is the loudest thing a band can do for a soloist, and it only works once in a performance.
And how to stop
With an ending in G: G7, G7, G7, G7, C7, C7, G7, G7, D7, C7, G7, A♭7 then G7.
The last bar stops on the I instead of turning to the V, arriving from the chord a semitone above. The heavier outline is the one bar that differs from the twelve-bar blues. Where the twelve-bar blues uses three chords, this uses four. One of its bars holds two chords.
The last bar goes to the I instead of turning back to the V, and it arrives from the chord a semitone above it. That semitone is what makes an ending sound like an ending rather than like someone stopping.
What you have
Six notes and where they sit. Twelve bars and how they can be filled. Which note wants to move and which does not, over any chord you are handed. Two ways to bend, four ways to turn one idea over, five positions and the joins between them, and a form with passing chords in it. None of that is a repertoire. It is a way of listening, and the notes were only ever how you got at it.
What is left is the part no course can do for you, which is playing it badly for a while in front of people who are better than you. Go and do that.
This lesson was drafted with the help of AI, so it may contain a mistake. Its diagrams are drawn by Everyfret’s own software. How Everyfret is made