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Why the blues breaks the rules. The blues is built on dominant 7 chords — I, IV, and V all dominant — which makes it non-diatonic, so the cycle-of-fifths decoder from the last lesson doesn't apply. This high-level tour lays out your scale options over a blues in A (major pentatonic, minor pentatonic, Mixolydian, and the soon-to-come blues scale), the classic move of bending the minor third into the "gray area" between minor and major, and the idea of writing a flight plan — deciding your scales chord-by-chord before you play.
What follows is this lesson’s section of the Course Guide — you can read it here or in the full guide →
Blues music is primarily built on dominant seventh chords. A basic 12-bar blues has three chords—I7, IV7, and V7—and no two of those chords fit inside a single major scale. Much of traditional music theory simply doesn’t apply to this situation, including the analysis of a song’s key from 8-1.
In this module, we’ll focus on a basic 12-bar blues in A. The chords will be A7 (I7), D7 (IV7), and E7 (V7). This is the basic progression in Nashville notation:
and in the key of A:
Blues players use a variety of scales to navigate the blues. One approach is to use the minor pentatonic (or minor blues) scale that corresponds to the key of the song (i.e., the root of the I chord). It’s also common to match scales to individual chords. You can usually play either a minor or major pentatonic scale that matches the root of any chord. Traditional theory suggests that the Mixolydian mode fits a dominant seven chord well, so that’s yet another option.
These are the most common scale choices for a blues in A (anywhere you see a pentatonic scale, you can substitute a blues scale of the same key):
| A7 (I7) | D7 (IV7) | E7 (V7) |
|---|---|---|
| A minor pentatonic | A minor pentatonic | A minor pentatonic |
| A major pentatonic | D major pentatonic | E major pentatonic |
| A Mixolydian | E minor pentatonic | |
| It is a good idea to decide ahead of time which scales you intend to use over each chord in the progression. I call this a flight plan, and we’ll talk more about it soon. |
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