Step 1

Step 1: Choosing A Key or Scale for the Blues Song
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Have you ever noticed how symphonies are named by they key or scale they are written in? For instance, Mozart wrote his Symphony No. 39 in Eb Major. This gives the listener an idea of the mood of the music, since different keys evoke different moods. Minor evokes sadness, and major evokes a happy mood. In this lesson, we will examine more closely how a key or scale works in the 12-bar blues form. When a jazz musician calls out to his band, "Let's play a blues in A minor," the musicians know exactly what to do because the form for the blues is standard. Jazz musicians know it has 12-bars. They know when the chords change from one chord to another over the 12-bar cycle. They also know what notes are in the A minor scale. With that information, they have enough to go on.

1. To understand the form of a 12-bar blues song, you need first to know what a scale or key is. The terms key or scale are essentially the same. In western music, we have 12 specific musical tones or pitches that we can draw upon to compose the melody and harmony (melody is a sequence of pitches organized by a key or scale) for a song.
   
   Look at the diagram below of a western piano keyboard. Looking left to right locate the first A. Count that as one, and count all the notes both black and white up to but not including the next note A. You should have counted 12 pitches altogether from A to A an octave higher.
   
   These 12 notes repeat throughout the keyboard as you can see. But essentially, without defining the term octave here, they are the same 12-notes. These notes are all the building blocks in western music for all the songs and symphonies that have ever been composed.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   However, 12 different pitches presents way too many possibilities for combining tones. We have to narrow things down. That is why we have scales or keys. These scales or keys limit the 12 pitches to manageable units, usually seven different notes. In western music there are more than 200 different keys or scales.
   
   
   
2. With that in mind, we are going to compose our blues in the key of A minor. The blues sound better in a minor key than in a major one, but at this moment do not worry about that.
   
   Start on the first A and include only the white notes up to G just before the A repeats an octave higher. Hence the notes in the A minor scale are limited to 7. They are
   
   A B C D E F G (In this case no black keys--that is, sharps or flats--are used).
   
   (Note that if we wanted to make this an A major scale, we would replace the C F and G with a C# F# and G#. Then those seven notes make up the A major scale, which would give our song an entirely different feeling, more happy and light. Minor scales generally connote sadness, deep and thoughtful).
   
   Summary: Now we have selected the seven notes in the key of A minor that we will use to build the melody and harmony for our blues song.