How Stevie Ray Vaughan Avoided Standard Blues Turnarounds And Created His Own

By Blue Morris

I had a really interesting discussion with someone in our Patreon group this week, and we stumbled onto something that genuinely surprised me. If you listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan's first album, Texas Flood, from start to finish, you won't hear any of those standard turnarounds that us guitar teachers teach all the time. You won't hear the classic walk-ups. You won't hear the chromatic runs. You won't hear those textbook blues-ending licks that get passed down from teacher to student. Not one of them. On the whole album!

But here's the thing — he absolutely has his own way of navigating the last four bars of the 12-bar blues. And it's unmistakably Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The Last Two Bars: Where SRV Keeps It Simple

Now, here's what I think most people miss about this: when Stevie Ray Vaughan is singing, he tends to keep his turnarounds simpler. Just covering those last two bars. Sometimes bars nine and ten are even simpler — maybe just the chords, or whatever riff he's playing at that moment.

Some guitar players think of the last four bars of the 12-bar blues form as an entire turnaround. To me it's really just the last two bars that officially make up the turnaround. That's where most of these SRV licks happen.

The Slide — His Go-To Move for Bar 11

The single most common thing he does is this slide up into extension shape of Minor Pentatonic, holding and sliding both the G and B strings to form a double-stop slide. Have a look at the first measure in the tabs below:

He often plays those double stops as triplets, but not always. Occasionally he changes the rhythm. But the slide itself is the same move, over and over, because it works!

And then he walks back down to E, usually sliding back down to Shape 1 open position.

At the beginning of that bar you can see that common Stevie Ray Vaughan Pride and Joy kind of thing. He hits the root, then goes up to the top two strings, played open with an upstroke. Those two open strings are part of the E chord so it works.

You'll hear those moves throughout so many of the licks SRV uses in these last two bars of the blues form.

Walking to the Five Chord — Simple and Effective

After that, the blues form needs to hit the V chord, in this case a B7. If he's singing at this point, he usually keeps it quite simple. Just a basic walk to the V chord is common, as in the above example.

We tend to think of Stevie Ray Vaughan's sound — his style — as being incredibly complex. And sure, he could be. But when you really look at his playing, he has a lot of the same moves he makes again and again. Walking to the five chord is one of them.

Sometimes it's complex. Sometimes it's shockingly simple. Just a walk-up from the root — maybe a little shuffle feel, maybe he'll hit that V chord at the end for emphasis. If you really love that Pride and Joy shuffle thing, you can add an upstroke right at the beginning of the last bar.

The Full Four-Bar Turnaround: Where It Gets Interesting

Now let's zoom out and consider the full last four bars as the turnaround. This is where SRV might play something more flashy, especially if it's during solo, but even sometimes when he's singing, especially over the V chord in measure 10 of the blues form.

Back up a few beats and walk up to the V chord because we're walking up to measure nine, and measure nine is the V chord:

After strumming that B7 for bar 9, give one of those little upswings of the open strings (in the style of Pride and Joy) before launching into a common SRV lick that is really cool. It combines an A major triad arpeggio with an E minor pentatonic blues lick. Together, they sound incredible. And he plays this a lot. You can hear variations of it in several songs.

The A Major Arpeggio Moment

The first three notes of the last bar in the example above is the A major arpeggio. It makes sense because bar 10 in a 12-bar in E would be an A7 chord. It's the IV chord. We've already walked to the V, and now we're on the IV — an A chord.

Switching to E Minor Pentatonic

Then, he changes his thinking. He switches to E minor pentatonic, the bluesiest of scales you could play in a blues in E.

Remember to visulaize the scale shape that rather than just reading the numbers of the tabs. What pentatonic shape is it? E Minor Pentatonic Shape 3, what I call "Triple Stack."

Notice also that he's added the blue note on the high E string to his lick. He uses the blue note as a hammer then pull-off. This is rather unique to SRV.

This kind of ornamental style — that extra little salt and pepper — is what I'd say distinguishes Stevie Ray Vaughan from blues players before him.

Sometimes I think that note sounds a little strange in the context of an A chord — it's kind of like a flat ninth, a little weird. But it's the blue note of E minor pentatonic, so it works.

The mix of the sweetness of that A major arpeggio and the dissonance of E minor pentatonic sound so great together.

Put It All Together

Try combining these two. Keep in mind that I have them in backwards order. My first example is for measures 11-12. So play my second example and then the first and you have a killer sequence for measures 9-12 of a 12 bar blues that is very Stevie Ray Vaughan!

There's a lot going on in there: a major triad arpeggio, a minor pentatonic descent, blue note hammer-ons, G-sharp pull-offs from the E7 chord, and that unmistakable Pride and Joy shuffle energy.

None of it is the standard textbook turnaround. All of it is pure Stevie Ray Vaughan.

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