It seems that having a good arsenal of blues guitar chords is harder than I thought to find online.
So I made a PDF of many good, useable blues chords.
You’ll notice that I talk about partial chords. Partial chords are particularly important when playing with a band because you don’t want to get in the way of the bass or drums.
Usually all you have to do is remove the bottom couple of strings (or string) from the chord and you have what I affectionately call a partial chord. In reality, there’s still plenty of chord there.
The most important notes in a blues guitar chord are the 3rd and 7th of the chord. If that doesn’t make sense to you, I’m referring to the scale tones that make up the chord.
For a 7th chord, which is short for dominant 7th, and is the most common type of chord in blues, there is a root, 3rd, 5th, and flatted 7th tone of the major scale. So for C major, the notes are C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C and the notes of the chord would be C, E, G, Bb.
It’s really not that important to know all of that right now, you just need to work with your chords and get them under your fingers. Hopefully my little blues guitar chord chart will help you out with that.
