Spicy Gospel and Jazz Blues Progressions

Without doing a lot of talking about the theory side of things, let’s see if we can get your fingers moving towards the right places.

The first exercise spices up your average 12 bar blues progression–although I didn’t go through the trouble to write out all twelve bars–if you’re looking to “spice up” your blues progressions, you should already know the basics–so check out my other blog posts “Beginner’s Guide to Jamming: the Blues.”

After that, the following exercises take you through a typical gospel blues chord progression, and each exercise gradually adds a little flavor.

A dash of walking bassline here, a pinch of tritone substitution there. Spice up your chord progressions.

Edit: There was an error in the original PDF, on the C#7#9 chord, which has now been corrected.