A minor blues keeps the twelve bars and changes the chords under them. The I and the IV become minor sevenths, and near the end a chord arrives from outside the key — a ♭VI7 — and falls onto the V. It is the same architecture with a different color.
The minor blues, against the twelve bars you know
The minor blues in A: Am7, Am7, Am7, Am7, Dm7, Dm7, Am7, Am7, F7, E7, Am7, E7.
Minor sevenths on i and iv, and a ♭VI7 from outside the key falling onto the V. The heavier outlines are the eleven bars that differ from the twelve-bar blues. Where the twelve-bar blues uses three chords, this uses four.
The two minor sevenths, as moved shapes
Am7 as the Em7 shape at fret 5 and Dm7 as the Am7 shape at fret 5.
Am7 is the open Em7 shape moved up five frets. Dm7 is the open Am7 shape moved up five frets. Your first finger lies across the strings at the marked fret, doing the job the nut does for an open chord. Both sit between frets five and seven.
Both are shapes you already move: the open Em7 carried up to A, and the open Am7 carried up to D. The ♭VI7 and the V7 at the end are dominant sevenths, which you have been playing since Part 1.
What it does to your notes
The same note, over a minor blues
C rests over Am7 C rests over Am7 C rests over Am7 C rests over Am7 C rests over Dm7 C rests over Dm7 C rests over Am7 C rests over Am7 C rests over F7 C leans onto B over E7 C rests over Am7 C leans onto B over E7
Read the row: it rests over Am7, rests over Dm7, rests over F7 and leans onto B over E7. A filled disc is a note you can stop on and a tick under it leans onto the note below.
This is the interesting part. In a major blues the ♭3 is the blue note: it rubs against the chord’s major third and wants to bend. Here the I and the IV are minor, so the ♭3 belongs to both of them, and the F7 has it too. Over three of the four chords it is simply a note you can stop on, and only over the V does it lean.
That changes how the scale feels to play. The tension you were bending into in Part 2 is mostly gone, and what is left is a scale that sits inside the chords. Players answer that by leaning on the other notes — the 4 and the ♭7 — and by saving the bends for the V.
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