Twelve bars is the blues most people mean, and it is not the only one. Plenty of well-known blues run eight bars, with the same three chords in a different order and a turn that comes twice as often.
Eight bars, against the twelve you know
The eight-bar blues in A: A7, E7, D7, D7, A7, E7, A7, E7.
Two lines of four bars instead of three, and the V arrives in the second bar. The heavier outlines are the six bars that differ from the twelve-bar blues.
The twelve-bar gives you four bars of home before anything moves. The eight-bar gives you one. The V is there in bar two, the IV in bar three, and by bar five you are home again with three bars left. Nothing is harder. It simply moves faster, and a phrase that would fit comfortably in the first line of a twelve-bar runs out of room here.
What your hand already knows
The blue third, through eight bars
C bends up over A7 C leans onto B over E7 C rests over D7 C rests over D7 C bends up over A7 C leans onto B over E7 C bends up over A7 C leans onto B over E7
Read the row: it bends up over A7, leans onto B over E7 and rests 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.
Everything from the last part still holds. The score is the same score, read over a shorter form: the ♭3 bends over the I, rests over the IV and leans over the V, wherever those chords happen to fall. What changes is how quickly you have to make up your mind.
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