The blues turnaround never resolves - that's the point

You're playing a 12-bar blues on a loop. Everything's fine for eleven bars, and then, as you go back to bar one, it snags: either you mark a stop, or it sounds like you're restarting a finished tune rather than continuing a cycle. The culprit has a name — the turnaround — and a function almost everyone misreads at first.

Where it is, and what it looks like

The turnaround is the last two bars of a blues grid (bars 11 and 12). On Guitarshelf, the sheet Blues turnaround — E isolates them from the rest: E7-A7-E7-B7, that is degrees I-IV-I-V. Often a short chromatic line, descending or ascending, dresses up these two bars, but the harmonic skeleton is always the same: you briefly pass through the I and the IV, and you end on the V.

Why it ends on the grid's most unstable chord

The V (here B7) is the dominant: it's the chord that, to the ear, "calls" for the return to the tonic. A dominant seventh chord contains a tritone, a dissonant interval that seeks to resolve. Ending bar 12 on B7 means deliberately leaving the tension open to the maximum — and that tension has only one possible way out: the E7 of bar 1. That's exactly the intended effect: the turnaround doesn't conclude, it relaunches.

Conversely, a grid that ended bar 12 on the I (E7) would sound "finished". Looping it would feel like starting from scratch every time round, with a small break. That's precisely the most common mistake: slowing down on the turnaround and "landing" the last chord, like the end of a tune.

Turnaround, cadence, ending lick: three roles not to confuse

A perfect cadence (V then I, resolved) concludes a phrase: it closes. The turnaround does the opposite — it stops on the V, unresolved, to reopen. An ending lick is a melodic phrase played once to punctuate the very last time round, when you really decide to stop. All three come at the end of the grid, none does the same job. The detail is covered in the glossary entry Turnaround.

On Guitarshelf

Two sheets tackle the turnaround from two angles. Blues turnaround — E works the chord movement on its own, to hear it as a harmonic sequence. Blues turnaround riff — E minor gives the melodic version, a descending phrase in the pentatonic that follows the same relaunch logic.

The best exercise: play a full grid like Blues in E — shuffle rhythm, then chain the turnaround on the end — without slowing down, without marking a stop, going straight back to bar one. If the join is seamless, you've got it.

The mistake to avoid

Never treat the turnaround as an ending. Keep the same tempo as the rest of the grid — it's the passage densest in chord changes, and the temptation to rush it or drag it is strong — and don't resolve the final B7: let the tension pull you toward the start.