Every 12-bar blues has to turn around, and bar 12 is where the music circles back to the top. Bricks 9 and 10 give you two quick, elegant ways to mark that moment — licks that signal the turnaround with authority and keep your solo sounding structured and intentional.
What you’ll get out of this lesson: You’ll learn two short licks for bar 12 of the 12-bar blues — one that uses the top four notes of the minor pentatonic position, and one that skips an octave for a dramatic drop-off effect — and complete your full set of ten Blues Bricks.
The Turnaround at Bar 12
In bar 12, the blues has what’s called the turnaround — a quick return to the V chord before the progression starts again. It’s a brief moment, which is why these licks are shorter and quicker than the ones for bar 9. The turnaround happens fast, so you need a fragment that makes its point immediately. The diagram below shows the bar 12 context in the 12-bar structure.
Brick 9 — The Top-String Run
Brick 9 uses the top four notes of the minor pentatonic position. Starting at the 15th fret, then 12 on the high E, then 12 and 15 on the B with a slight quarter-tone bend. The middle note here is a borrowed chord tone from the V chord — described as a kind of sharp 9 or flat 3rd depending on how you want to justify it — and it’s exactly that note that makes the harmony shift feel clear. Relate all of this back to the root position so you know how to transpose it to any key.
Brick 10 — The Drop-Off
Brick 10 is a cool drop-off lick. It goes: 12 to 13 on the G string, 12 on the B, and then a large skip down an octave to the 14th fret on the A string. That octave jump is the defining feature — it hits the root of the V chord and lands with real weight. It sounds simple written out, but in context, over a backing track, it sounds dramatic and decisive. When you play through the last four bars of the blues, you’ll hear exactly how that landing note marks the turnaround.
Can you hear how that little outlined that by hitting the root? It hits the root of it.
Bringing All Ten Bricks Together
With these two in place, you now have bricks for every key moment in a 12-bar blues: ideas for the opening bars, for bar 5 when the IV chord arrives, for bar 9 when the V chord comes in, and for bar 12 at the turnaround. You’ve got all these things to put together to make a full 12-bar blues solo sound like you know what you’re doing, like you’re hitting the harmony. The next step is starting to use them in real improvisation — and eventually, to come up with your own three and four-note fragments and add them to your personal collection.
Taking it further: Try improvising a full 12-bar solo using nothing but the ten bricks from this course, deploying each contextual brick (7, 8, 9, 10) in its correct bar. Then on the next pass, allow yourself to freely improvise between the bricks. Notice how having those anchor points makes the whole solo feel more intentional.
Your homework: Play through a 12-bar blues backing track from start to finish and insert Bricks 9 and 10 at bar 12 on alternate passes — Brick 9 one time through, Brick 10 the next. Get comfortable switching between them so you have a choice in the moment rather than always defaulting to one.