3 Simple Rules For Learning Jazz Chords (That Most Miss)
The first time you look at the chords in a jazz standard, it looks like a mix of random letters and numbers. Memorizing and playing them feels impossible. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this video, I’ll show you 3 simple exercises that stop you from drowning in chords when you’re learning jazz.
Thinking like this has helped hundreds of my students (and also helped me when I was starting out). With that approach, jazz songs make sense, and learning them becomes 100x easier. And that means you can spend more time on what really matters: making music.
#1 The Most Important Chord Relationship
Let’s start with a simple and essential exercise—but don’t underestimate it. It’s the single best way to put chords into context—and it helps you more than you’d expect.
When you look at a jazz standard, the chords can feel disconnected. But most songs are built on a small set of chords that all belong to the same key.
If you train your hands and ears to recognize those chords as a group, everything gets easier.
The easiest way to do that is to practice the diatonic chords of that scale. Let’s take C major, and use shell voicings to go through the scale. Shell voicings are a great place to start because they’re easy to play, but can be expanded into almost anything:
You want to work on this with the shell voicings until it is easy to play in time,
but there is another variation of this exercise that I will get to in a bit, which does something else that is both fun and important.
The basic exercise with the shell voicings helps you: Learn the chord shapes, understand how the chords sit in the key, and you start building an overview of the key on the fretboard.
Let’s move this to a song. Take a look at Fly Me To The Moon. The song is in C major, which means that when you look at it, you are aware of the diatonic chords of C major. which helps with playing them and seeing them together as a group.
In this case, that explains most of the harmony and helps you find them on the fretboard because you have already practiced those chords together.
You probably already do this with some progressions: If you know that you are in C major, then a G7 or Dm7 are not mysterious chords, you know what they are. Like this you are just expanding that context and connecting chords, moving away from random letters and symbols to learn by heart.
Of course, this doesn’t explain all the chords in the song.
But don’t worry—we’ll get to the rest later in the video.
Practice: Drilling Vs Discovering Chords
The next step is to expand on that exercise. Try playing through all the diatonic chords of a key, starting from both the 6th-string
and 5th-string roots.
Begin on the lowest available chord on that string set and work your way up. This builds your fretboard knowledge and gives you a strong overview of which chords are in the scale.
Now, this isn’t just useful for shell voicings. You can apply the same approach to other common types, like drop 2
or drop 3 voicings.
For more specific voicings, especially those with numerous extensions, it’s not always efficient to drill every single version through all 12 keys. You’re just not going to use all of them.
But, exploring voicings this way is still extremely valuable. It trains your ears, strengthens your theory, and helps you find new chords and sounds.
Take this rootless G7(9,13), for example:
This chord belongs to C major, it is a G7 with unaltered extensions, but if you move the same shape down the scale, keeping it diatonic, you get interesting results:
Now let’s name the chords one by one. This is a great fretboard and theory exercise if you have never tried.
Rootless voicings like these leave considerable room for interpretation. I really like this shape, Fmaj7(9,13).
It is easy to play, and it sounds great if you use it as an Fmaj7 in the key of F.
Check it out:
When you practice like this, it’s not about drilling everything until it’s perfect. It’s about discovering new chords and colors—and turning them into music. This is also how I saw Barry Harris explore harmony in the piano workshops at the conservatory: Try different things, take the stuff you like. Let’s move on to the next skill which makes learning songs 1000x easier!
#2 How A Pro Thinks About Chords
Try to remember this sequence of symbols: G — V — 1 — T — 4 — R
Did you get it? It just seems random. But now look at it again: GV1T4R
Suddenly, it’s something familiar: “GUITAR.” That’s the power of chunking information—grouping symbols into ideas you already know. And that’s exactly how pros think about chord progressions.
Instead of memorizing 12 isolated chords, you memorize 4 musical phrases. You’re not reading a sentence letter by letter—you’re reading words.
Take the song “Solar.”
It looks complex, but when you break it down, it’s mostly II V I progressions,
first to F major, then to Eb major, to Db major and finally a minor II V I back to Cm.
Patterns you already know.
But you want to go beyond just major and minor II V I’s: Another essential progression is a turnaround,
mostly played as I VI II V,
and you have those in both major and minor. An important point with these is that you should group together similar progressions, so a III VI II V is also just a turnaround.
Thinking in larger groups helps you be more flexible with the songs and able to adapt on the fly when playing with others.
Another common one is IV IVm I, so in C major, that would be Fmaj7 Fm6 Cmaj7.
This is also a progression with a lot of variations, and many of them are incredibly beautiful. A common variation is Fmaj7 Bb7 Cmaj7, which is really the same function almost the same chords:
It is also very practical to see more static progressions as one chunk, like a minor line cliché
Grouping the chords together like this is similar to how Barry Harris or Joe Pass see it: The II chord is often just part of the V. That kind of thinking simplifies everything, making playing feel natural.
So the next time you look at a lead sheet, don’t see a list of chords. Look for musical words. Learn to read harmony the way pros do.
#3 The Strongest Connection In Harmony
Remember that part of Fly Me To The Moon that we couldn’t explain earlier?
Let’s look at what’s really going on.
There are two dominant chords that don’t belong to the key of C major: E7 and A7. But they sound completely natural because you can already hear where they are resolving to. That’s because they’re secondary dominants. E7 resolves to Am7, and a few bars later, A7 resolves to Dm7.
The song isn’t modulating—it’s still in C major. But those dominants are used to lead strongly into another chord within the key.
A secondary dominant is a chord that temporarily acts like the V chord of something other than the tonic. So A7 is the V of Dm7, and E7 is the V of Am7.
They’re not diatonic to the C major scale, but they feel right—because they’re doing what dominant chords do: creating tension and resolving it.
Sometimes secondary dominants are accompanied by their II chord. That is also what you see in Fly Me To The Moon, where it’s a complete minor II V:
Since secondary dominants and II–Vs show up so often in standards, it makes sense to practice them in context. One exercise you can try is to take the diatonic chords of a key and insert a dominant before each one. A simple version with shell-voicings might look like this:
You can also take this idea further by practicing secondary cadences. That means adding a II–V in front of each chord in the key—but adapting the cadence depending on whether you’re resolving to a major or minor chord. Let’s try this in F major.
If the target chord is Bbmaj7 (the IV chord), then you play a major II–V:
If the target is a minor chord, like Gm7 (the ii chord in F), then you use a minor II–V:
To really hear the difference between these cadences, I’m using full voicings with more extensions, not just shell voicings.
With this system of chunking chords and understanding harmony, you’re already way ahead in learning jazz standards. But you need to play the chords, not just remember them, and there is a simple method pros like Joe Pass use all the time, which is more accessible than you might think, and incredibly powerful! That is what I cover in this video. Check it out!
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