Home › Forums › Beginner Guitar Discussions › What exactly is a Turnaround??
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May 4, 2022 at 2:48 am #307832
As I am trying to deep dive into Blues… one thing I am not exactly clear. I am not talking about Playing a turnaround… I want to know… Why is turnaround so important?? Is turnaround something that Has to be incorporated while telling a story? Is turnaround any different from Intro or any Lead line?? Can any Blues enthusuast explain it to me please, or give links to some authentic study materual.
Sumanto Banerjee
Storming Heaven's Gate
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May 4, 2022 at 3:16 am #307835
Hi Sumanto,
A “turnaround”, as the word suggests, is a musical trick to get the ball rolling for another turn. It is by no means specific to the blues: you find it in almost all music genres.The musical device to achieve this is often the “half cadence”: the musical phrase ends on the V or V7 chord, which creates a sense of “incompleteness”. The listener definitely expects a continuation.
In a blues, the last bar or half bar of each verse has a V7 chord leading into the I chord of the first bar of the next verse.The turnaround is extremely frequent, but it is absolutely not mandatory. There are many blues songs in which each verse ends on the I chord.
Hope this helps.
JM -
May 4, 2022 at 6:35 am #307841
Thank you so much Jean… yeah understood.
Storming Heaven's Gate
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May 4, 2022 at 3:17 pm #307871
Note that Brian has done several lessons dealing with turnarounds. Maybe go to the Lessons page and do a search for turnaround. It might work. Or not.
Sunjamr Steve
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May 5, 2022 at 3:34 am #307901
Hi Sumanto You will find a good start/introduction in lesson LEG 009 and also a nice jaz piece in EP336. once you listen to these you will find you already likely know some classic turnarounds.
All the best
JohnStrat -
May 5, 2022 at 10:05 pm #307948
Just wanted to add some historical context. Many great blues tunes, particularly from back in the early years of recorded music, do not include turnarounds. In fact, many do not even go to the V chord, and some hang on the I chord for the whole song. I’m really into that BTW 🙂
As a friend of mine is fond of saying “some people say the blues is just three chords. I say it doesn’t have to be that complicated”. Nothing in the blues is mandatory if you go back far enough.
Some think that the formularization of early blues into the ‘straight 12 bar blues w/turnaround’ format started with Bluebird Records gathering players in Chicago that had emigrated from the south. I tend to agree. Bluebird provided housing for them and organized ensemble gigs, in part to promote Bluebird’s 78 recordings. Tampa Red and Big Bill Broonzy, among many other great ensemble players, were at the center of that period of natural change.
To this day, when multiple musicians get together to play informal, vernacular music we naturally have to find some common ground in order to not miss the changes.
As a sidetrack, I’ve found that Irish traditional music is a possible exception to this, unless you want to spend all your time practising note perfect jigs and reels and segues into other tunes in different keys- and time signatures, and nothing else. I love listening to it but life is too short for me to learn how to play it at a high enough level.
So my thesis is that back then, 1930s Chicago, 12-bar-blues-with-a-turnaround became enshrined because it sounded great, you could sing many different melodies over the top of it, and everyone in the band knew how to do it without much rehearsing, both live and in the studio. And that is still the case.
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May 6, 2022 at 1:25 am #307960
Very interesting!
It looks like many pre-Chicago Delta blues songs already used the “traditional” 12-bar form (with or without turnaround), but the Chicogo evolution may have generalized that.
What I do know for sure is that the bluesmen of the Delta blues period already stole each other’s melodies quite often… copyrights were apparently less of an issue back then 😉
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May 7, 2022 at 8:41 pm #308105
You’re right Jean-Michel. I could list dozens of pre-1930 blues records that are strict 12 bars, with- or without a turnaround. And I could list thousands of what are clearly blues songs that were not exactly 12 bars.
Early recorded blues (1920s) is full of examples of ‘broken’ time, where the performer will go long- or short at some point in the verse. Then do it somewhere else in the next verse, or not at all. It’s very hard to do, particularly if you’re playing with other musicians, since we’re all so used to what has become the standard 12 bar blues.
Sometimes there’s no V chord at all, just the I and the IV, though the singer usually implies the V over the top of it so you think it’s a standard 12 bar.
When Lester Melrose, talent scout for Bluebird, brought his guys together for gigs and recordings there had to be some standard otherwise it would have started out as a shambles which would have taken too much rehearsal time and argumentation to sort out.
The Bluebird roster included Broonzy, Tampa Red, Sonny Boy Williamson #1 and many other fine musicians who were experienced enough to know how to get the job done. Simplify a little bit, iron-out the quirks, play together as a band and make a living.
By the end of the Great Depression the 1920’s old country blues way of messing around with the form and playing it exactly the way you feel it at the time was being superseded. It was inevitable. Thank goodness the old recordings are still out there in digital form, for those who can stand the surface noise, transferred faithfully from the surviving whupped 78 records.
Me, I love scratchy old blues recordings and I love pristine modern ones too. I’m non-denominational in that respect.
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