The bird blues, in every key
Twelve bars with twenty chords in them, and a reputation for being the blues that stops guitarists at the door. Most of that reputation belongs to the soloing. Comped, nine of the twelve bars are ii–Vs you already know, and the hardest-looking stretch of all turns out to be one shape sliding down the neck a fret at a time.
Twelve bars, twenty chords
A blues has three chords in it. This one has twenty, in the same twelve bars, and it is the form that gets called when someone at the session wants to see who has done the work.
Most of its difficulty is a soloing difficulty: the key moves every two beats and the notes that fit move with it. Comping is a different job, and the count is friendlier than it looks. Nine of the twelve bars are ii–Vs — the two-chord move this site has been teaching from the beginning. Almost nothing here is new. What is new is how fast they arrive, and in what order.
One change at the top makes the rest possible. Bar 1 is a major seventh where a blues has a dominant, so the tonic stops sounding like somewhere to sit and starts sounding like somewhere to leave. Charlie Parker built the device into his blues writing at the start of the 1950s, and it has carried his nickname ever since.
Bars 2 to 4: down by whole steps
The first chain is three ii–Vs in three bars, each one a whole step below the last, and each one's dominant resolving down a fifth onto the next one's minor chord. They are ordinary cadences, chained end to end: every bar hands you to the next the way a ii–V hands you to a I.
The first of the three is a minor ii–V. Its ii chord is half-diminished rather than a plain minor seventh, because what it is aiming at is the minor chord in the bar after it. That is the sound that tells you, two beats in, that this is not the blues you were expecting.
Two voices hold inside every one of these ii–Vs, and they are the same two every time: the minor chord's root is already the fifth of the dominant that follows, and its third is already that dominant's seventh. In F, going from Em7♭5 to A7, the note that sits still is G — a third in the first chord, a seventh in the second. The other pair falls: the seventh drops a half step onto the next third, which is the guide-tone resolution every ii–V on this site is built from. The half-diminished chord makes it cheaper still, because its fifth is already flattened and has only a half step left to travel.
Then watch where your hand does not go. The harmony drops a whole tone a bar for three bars and the shapes do not drop with it: each minor chord arrives in a different inversion from the one before, and the window stays where it is or creeps upward. A whole step is two frets, and turning the shape over costs less than traveling that far.
Bars 6 to 9: down by half steps
Bar 5 is the IV7, one of only three bars this form shares with an ordinary jazz blues. Bar 6 takes that chord and makes it minor, and that is the entire move — one voice down a half step and the other three untouched. In F, B♭7 becomes B♭m7 the moment D drops to D♭. One finger, and the form tips over into its second descent.
From there it falls chromatically. Four minor chords in a row, each a half step below the last — the iv, the iii, the ♭iii, and then the ii — with a dominant seventh wedged between each pair. The last of the four needs no dominant of its own: it is already the ii of the cadence that ends the chorus, so the chain does not stop before home, it arrives there.
Look at those seven cards next to one another and the reputation collapses. The four minor chords are not four shapes. They are one shape, played a fret lower each time. The three dominants between them are one shape too. Nothing is re-fingered anywhere in this passage — it is two grips and a slide, for the plainest reason there is: a half step on a guitar is one fret, so moving the shape you are already holding is the shortest distance available.
That is the difference between the two chains, and it is worth saying out loud. The first falls by whole steps and the shapes turn over. The second falls by half steps and the shapes travel. Same device, opposite mechanics — and the passage that looks hardest on paper is the one your hand has least to do in.
The joins say it again in numbers. Inside each ii–V, two voices hold, exactly as they did in the first chain. Between one ii–V and the next, three voices move a half step and one stays: the dominant's third is already the seventh of the minor chord a half step below it. Across the whole chorus, no voice anywhere travels more than three semitones, and the twenty chords cost seventy-six of them in total. Played in root position instead, the same twenty cost between four hundred and twelve and four hundred and seventy-eight — more than five times the movement for the same harmony, which is the argument for voice leading stated at the largest scale this site has to offer.
Every sound on this page is the Drop2 app's own sampled guitar, bass, and drums — from the MuseScore General sound library, used under the MIT license.
Hear it move
The loop below is the app's Play-Along band — walking bass, swung ride, hi-hat on 2 and 4 — with the voicings above comped on top. In the two-chord bars the harmony turns over in under a second, which is why this form is learned as shapes and landmarks rather than read:
Three things to listen for. The two descents sound different even though both are descents — the first walks, the second slides. Bar 12 is bars 9 and 10 again, the same two shapes at half the length, which is the turnaround that throws you back to the top. And bar 1 keeps surprising you every chorus: after eleven bars of leaning, a major seventh sounds less like an arrival than like the next departure.
The same twelve bars, the older way
Here is an ordinary jazz blues in the same key, at the same tempo, with the same band and the same voice-led approach:
Exactly three of the twelve bars hold the same chord in both versions: bar 5's IV7, and the ii–V in bars 9 and 10. Those three are the landmarks a blues is recognized by, and the bird blues keeps every one of them. What it does is fill the space between them — the four bars getting to the IV, and the four bars getting back — with cadences, where the older form simply waits on the tonic. Nothing is being replaced. The skeleton is identical; only the traffic between the bones is different.
Take it around the keys
Start in F, which is where a session calls a blues, and which is where the ordinary jazz blues above sits too — so the two loops can be alternated with nothing changing but the changes. Then take it to B♭ and E♭, and after that wherever you like.
One part of the form transposes for free and one does not, which is worth knowing before you spend an evening on it. The chromatic chain is the same move in every key: find the minor shape, find the dominant shape, slide. Which two shapes those are depends on the key, but that there are only two does not. The whole-step chain is the part that has to be re-learned, because its three inversions land differently depending on where the key puts them. Practice that half slowly and the other half will already be there.
Even then there is less to re-learn than twelve keys suggests. Across all twelve, the voice leading settles on only two sequences of inversions for this form — which of the two you get depends on the key, and there is no third. The frets move every time; the choreography is one of two.
A useful drill: loop one key until you can hear bar 6 turning minor without looking for it. That single half step is the door into the second descent, and once your ear knows it, the four bars after it stop needing to be counted.
Where Drop2 comes in
The Drop2 app teaches the vocabulary this page comps with. Learn shows all four inversions of six seventh-chord qualities on three string sets — including the half-diminished chord that opens bar 2 — and Train calls a voicing and listens, through the microphone, to whether you found it, which is the part a page cannot do.
Play-Along, part of Premium, is a band like the one above with the guitar chair empty, and it loops Bird Blues under Tunes in whichever key you set — alongside the plain and jazz blues, so the comparison on this page is one you can keep making at your own tempo. Lines, also part of Premium, runs the same twelve bars for soloing and names the guide tone to aim at in each bar, which on changes that move this fast is the difference between playing the form and chasing it.
Free to start, no time limit · Works with acoustic and electric guitar
Next: All the progression pages →