The Slow 12/8 Ballad

A large share of the most famous soul records are slow and in 12/8 — four beats to the bar, but each beat divided into three rather than two. It is the feel of a great many ballads, and it is worth being able to count: one-and-a two-and-a three-and-a four-and-a, evenly, with the snare landing on two and four.

At these tempos strumming is usually the wrong choice. A strum at forty beats per minute leaves an enormous hole after it and tends to sound clumsy. The standard answer is to break the chord up and let the triplets carry the motion — an arpeggio, in other words, with the three notes of each beat doing the work.

Here is a D minor arpeggio in that feel, two beats long.

Two beats of a 12/8 arpeggio

Three notes per beat, evenly spaced. All of them are notes of D minor — the shape is just the open chord, picked apart.

e
B
G
D
A
E

--------------------1--------------|
--------------3-----------3--------|
--------2-----------------------2--|
--0--------------------------------|
-----------------------------------|
-----------------------------------|

Dm

The chord those notes come from: open D minor.

Dm7

And the same chord with a seventh added, which is the more common colour in a soul ballad. The note on the second string drops two frets, from D to C.

Two things to get right. Keep the triplets even — the commonest mistake is rushing the third note of each group, which turns the feel into something closer to a shuffle. And let the notes ring into each other rather than damping them; this is the one context in this path where sustain is what you want.

Use a metronome at a genuinely slow tempo to check the subdivision. Set it around 50 to 60 and fit three evenly spaced notes between each click.

Metronome

Set it slow and count three notes to every click. If the third note of each group is early, you are rushing.

A slow, deep soul ballad in D minor. Arpeggiate rather than strum, and let everything ring.