From the course: Beginning Blues Keyboard
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Turnarounds
- Now that you know how to comp and play all kinds of great stuff through a 12-bar blues form, you need to know how to get in and out of the form. For this, we need some turnarounds, some intros, and some endings. A turnaround is a musical figure used at the end of the form to bring you back to the top. You use a turnaround when you're playing through the form more than once. It ends with a five-seven chord, because this leads perfectly back to the one chord at the top of the form. The simplest turnaround, in fact, is just to play the five chord with a couple of leading tones before it. (blues notes) Here's the last four bars of a blues with a very simple turnaround. (bluesy piano) Okay, a stronger way to approach that five-seven chord is to use a neighboring chord, a chord that's a half-step away from the chord you're approaching. A neighboring chord could either be above or below a chord, but in the blues we most often approach chords from the half-step above. If the five chord…
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