📄️ Intro
Blues You Can Use: Guitar Chords by John Ganapes is a focused guide to the essential chord voicings, progressions, and rhythms that define blues guitar. Whether you're comping behind a singer or laying down a gritty 12-bar groove, this book breaks down movable shapes, dominant 7th variations, and classic turnarounds in an accessible way. From open-position shuffles to jazzy substitutions, it arms you with the harmonic tools to play authentic blues with confidence.
📄️ Some Music Basics
Whole Steps / Half Steps
📄️ Triads
A chord is three or more different notes played as one unit.
📄️ Seventh Chords
Triads are the basic building blocks in tertian harmony. We saw in the last chapter that you use the 1st, 3rd, and 5th degrees of a scale to build a triad. To build a seventh chord, simply add the 7th scale degree on top of this triad. You end up with the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th scale degrees in your chord.
📄️ Sixth Chords
Sixth chords are a little different from the chords we've looked at so far because they can be major or minor but not dominant. They can be interchanged with some dominant chords in the blues, but by themselves they don't function as such. They are also different because we don't build them entirely from 3rds. Sixth chords are major or minor triads with the sixth scale degree added on top. The chord tones are the root, 3rd, 5th, and 6th. The 6th is an interval of a major 2nd (one whole step) above the 5th, instead of the interval of a 3rd.