Improvising using 12 Bar Blues Root Notes in 3rd Position on C harmonica

Hello, welcome to this week’s harmonica lesson where I am going to show you the root notes of a 12 bar blues in 3rd position.

This will help you get started improvising in 3rd position.

For this lesson you will need a harmonica in the key of C. This means we will playing over a backing track in the key of D.

12 bar blues theory

In a 12 bar blues there are 3 chords. The I chord, the IV chord and the V chord

In 2nd position, the root notes of these are the 2 draw, 4 blow and 4 draw

In 3rd position you just move these up 2 holes.

The I chord is the 4 draw

The IV Chord is the 6 blow

The V chord is the 6 draw

This means that we can improvise over the 12 bar blues using just these notes.

Try improvising over this backing track using just the root notes above.

Part of the fun of 3rd position is how easy it is to play over 2 octaves. This means we can also play the root notes down an octave

The I chord is the 1 draw

The IV chord is the 3 blow

The V chord is the 3 draw (whole step bend).

Really make sure that your 3 draw whole step bend is accurate and doesn’t sound out of tune over the V chord

Now you can try improvising over the backing track using the lower octave root notes

I suggest you keep practicing improvising just using the root notes for now until it becomes second nature.

Then, next week I will be showing you how you can play and use the blues scale in 3rd position.

Thank you so much for taking this lesson. Now you can do something for me – please share this on Facebook and/or twitter.

See you next week!