B Blues Scale on 12-String Guitar

Play the B Blues scale on 12-String Guitar with fretboard diagrams that map the pattern across the neck. The Blues scale has 6 notes per octave and belongs to the blues family.

B is available as an open course on 12-String Guitar, and 4 of its 5 open courses are scale tones — E (the 4th), A (the flat 7th), D (the flat 3rd), B (the root). The G string sits outside the scale. Open, the courses cover E2 to E4.

The minor pentatonic with a b5 "blue note" wedged in — that one extra note adds grit, tension, and a sly, vocal quality. Tough, expressive, and unmistakably bluesy.

Heard in: Blues, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, and boogie-woogie — Delta and Chicago blues, Hendrix, Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

12-String Guitar is strung in six courses of two, the lower four paired an octave apart, so each stopped note here sounds as two — which is why the shape rings thicker than the same grip on a single-strung instrument.

Each position shows the scale notes and their intervals from the root so you can connect the shape to its sound, hear it with audio playback, and practice it in any register. Movable patterns let you transpose the same fingering to other keys once it is learned.

Once a position is under your fingers, link the B Blues scale to the chords it harmonizes and to progressions in the key of B to start improvising and writing with it. Working a scale alongside its chords is the fastest way to make it stick and to hear how it colors a progression.