Category Archives: Study Guide

Pentatonic Scale In Jazz – Exploring An Important Sound

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These videos will show you how to develop Jazz lines and use them on Jazz Chords and Progressions so that you can start with material that you already know in Jazz.

When You Start Playing Jazz then using the Pentatonic Scale to really get the sound of different chords with alterations and extensions.

Check out the videos on YouTube

You can check out the videos as a playlist on YouTube here:

Pentatonic Scale in Jazz – Exploring an Important Sound

7 Pentatonic Tricks That Will Make You Play Better Jazz Solos

You might be getting Pentatonic scales wrong, and it is a really great and powerful Jazz sound even when you are using a very basic version of it. In this video, I am going to talk about how to come up with great pentatonic scale jazz licks and go over 7 ways to use pentatonic scales over chords I will start really simple and go pretty far out.

This pentatonic scales guitar lesson takes a look at how you can get some solid jazz licks using for the biggest part very basic pentatonic scale shapes and positions that you already know. For most guitar players the pentatonic scale is one of the first things we learn.

Check out the article here: 7 Pentatonic Tricks

9 Surprising Pentatonic Scale Secrets on a Blues

Pentatonic Scales and Modern Jazz go hand in hand just like a guitar and pentatonic scale do. In this video, I am going to try to bring the two together using a 12 bar blues and demonstrating 9 ways you can apply pentatonic scales to this chord progression. The ideas are not only going to be on which scale to use on which chord, but more about finding a series of pentatonic scales that you can use to create other movements on top of the jazz blues.

The blues is a great progression to explore reharmonizations and super-imposed pentatonic scales. There are a lot of very standard chord changes that can be approached in many interesting ways. Most of the examples are using several scales to demonstrate other ways to move through the changes, but there are also a few surprising scale choices for a chord here and there.

Each of the concepts is demonstrated on the 12 bar F blues and then the idea is analyzed and explained.

Check out the article here: 9 Pentatonic Scale Secrets on a Blues

The Things You Should Know In The Pentatonic Scale

The Pentatonic scale is one of the first things we learn on guitar, and it is also a great scale to use on top of Jazz Chords. But there are also a lot of really great melodies and arpeggios that most people don’t use. In fact, it is one of the best ways you can make really melodic sounding licks with large intervals.

In this video, I am going to show some of them and how you can use them in some really great sounding lines and not only try to play Eric Clapton’s licks on maj7 chords.

Check out the article here: Pentatonic Scales – You Should Know This

Pentatonic Scale vs Arpeggios – Focus on The Right Things

What to focus on when learning Jazz Guitar: The Pentatonic Scale that you know or the arpeggios that everybody keep talking about? It is difficult to make the right choice, but you also want to get it right so that you don’t practice something that won’t help you get what you want from playing Jazz!

Check out the article here: Pentatonics vs Arpeggios

5 Pentatonic Scales That Sound Great On A Maj7

A Pentatonic scale is a great resource to get some solid melodies and colorful extensions to shine on a maj7 chord. In this video, I am going to go over 5 options for pentatonic scales that are really great on a maj7 chord.

Some of them you know already, but I will also show you how to get them to sound a little more interesting.

A few others you probably don’t know and I actually had a hard time finding the right name for them.

I am going to go over the 5 scales but also give you some tips or hacks on how to make more interesting melodies with pentatonic scales because that is something that is very underestimated.

Check out the article and PDF here: 5 Pentatonic Scales for a Maj7

1 Pentatonic Scale over 8 Chords – Jazz Guitar Lesson

In this guitar lesson I will take one pentatonic scale and show you how it you can improvise over 8 different chords with it.

All the examples in this jazz guitar lesson are using the E minor pentatonic scale, and it is quite amazing the wide range of guitar chords you can use a simple pentatonic scale on.

Even if you already know how to play over chords, you should always be looking for new ways to come up with melodies and chances are that in this lesson you might find new inspiration to add some jazz scale sounds to your vocabulary that you don’t already use!

Check out the article and PDF here: 1 Pentatonic Scale on 8 Chords

Do you really know the pentatonic scale?

Most guitarists learn the pentatonic scale as one of the first things they ever learn on the guitar, and most of the time it is not a scale that we think too much about when we use it. It’s just the pentatonic scale and it’s something that is in our ears and fingers for years, even if we are already for the rest playing music with extended chords, altered dominants etc.

In this lesson I am going to take apart the pentatonic scale and look at some of the things that you can find in there since that might yield some new ways of using it by combining what you know of the pentatonic scale and what you know about improvising with chords and arpeggios

Check out the article and PDF here: Do you really know the pentatonic scale?

 

How To Learn Jazz Chord Melody – Study Guide

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These videos will help you learn to play and create your own beautiful chord melody arrangements.

The videos cover a lot of ground with putting chords under a melody, using different Jazz chords, and even playing chord solos and improvising in a solo guitar setting.

You can check them out on YouTube here: Chord Melody – Beautiful Jazz Guitar – Learn Jazz, Make Music

Easy Autumn Leaves Chord Melody and Quick How-to-Play!

Easy Chord Melody Lesson for Autumn Leaves with transcription and tabs. A short video explaining how to play the arrangement.

Autumn Leaves is a great song to get starting playing easy chord melody arrangements on guitar.

Chord melody is the style or technique where you play the melody of the song and add chords to it. Mostly making it a complete solo guitar arrangement with both harmony and melody.

In this lesson, you will learn a chord melody arrangement of Autumn Leaves. The chords that you will use are for the biggest part simple 3-note voicings called shell-voicings and I have also included some exercises to check those out.

Get the PDF here: Easy Autumn Leaves Chord Melody

Chord Solos – How To Get Started The Easy Way

I am sure you have heard a great chord solo by Wes, George Benson or Joe Pass, and it is a great sound that seems almost impossible to get into your own playing, but if you are a little practical about how you start working on it then it may not be as difficult as you think.

In this lesson, I am going to take one area of the neck and a II V I in G major and then I will show you how to start making your own chord solo licks with a few voicings that you probably already know.

Get the PDF here: Chord Solos – How To Get Started The Easy Way

Autumn Leaves – How To Use Drop 2 For An Easy Chord Melody

This video is on a chord melody arrangement of Autumn Leaves.You will learn how it is constructed. And give you different options in terms of Jazz chords and reharmonizations that you can use in your own jazz guitar chord melody arrangements

One of the things that I learned the most from when it comes to harmony and comping was harmonizing melodies, so making chord melody arrangements. When I was starting out I harmonized everything I could. That taught me so much about how to comp with more melody and play chords under a theme.

In this video, I am going to show you an arrangement of Autumn Leaves that uses drop2 voicings and you can use this as a solo arrangement but it also works great if you are playing in a band. I am also going to add some extra tricks to give you a way to add some color to your own songs.

Get the PDF here: Autumn Leaves – Chord Melody with Drop2

3 Things You Need To Know For Chord Melody

Chord Melody is Melody with Chords, so you take a melody and then you add chords to it. This is a way to play both harmony and melody of a song and you can do a lot of different things with chord melody arrangements and really add a beautiful another dimension to the song you are playing, making it a solo performance.

This video is taking a look at some important aspects of playing and making chord melody arrangements. Focusing on some different things that most people forget to consider.

Get the PDF here: 3 Things You Need To Know For Chord Melody

Chord Solo – How To Make Melodies And Find Chords

How Do you play chord solos? It is something we hear people do all the time on our favorite Jazz Guitar records by Wes, Joe Pass or George Benson. But it seems really complicated to play a Jazz guitar Chord Solo.

In this video, I am going to give you an example of an Easy Chord solo and then I am going to talk about how you can practice making your own solos. Another thing that you don’t want to miss is how working on this type of playing is something that can really boost your single-note solos.

Get the PDF here: Chord Solo – How To Make Melodies And Find Chords

Best exercise for jazz guitar chord solos! – Brain and fingers!

Chord solos have been a part of the Jazz Guitar skill set since the ’50s and ’60s when players like Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery used it in their music. A Chord solo is a harmonized melody line, so you don’t only improvise a melody, you also harmonize it by adding chords to it.

This might seem a little scary to start working on, but if what you want to work on is harmonizing melodies. One of the simplest melodies you can harmonize is a scale, so in this lesson, I will take an F major scale and show you how you can harmonize it with both some chords and some progressions.

Get the PDF here: Best exercise for jazz guitar chord solos! – Brain and fingers!

A more structured approach to Chord Melody

Chord Melody Survival Kit

 

Jazz Chords – Using Triads in Jazz Comping – Study Guide

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You can use triads to play jazz chords, and it is a very powerful tool for this. Triads are very flexible and easy to play while also sounding great as chords. In this playlist, I will go over how you can use the triads you already know to play great sounding jazz progressions using only easy 3-note jazz chords.

We can play a wide range of chords with these 3-note easy jazz chords and they are very easy to add notes to or change notes to give us the extensions or alterations we want.

You can check out the videos here or go through the playlist on YouTube through this link:

Jazz Chords – Using Triads in Jazz Comping – Study Guide

Working with Triads as Jazz Chords and making it a flexible tool

This video discusses how you can work with triads and inversions when comping, showing you how to voice-lead them, use inversions, and add extensions and alterations.

Finding Triads for 7th chords

This video is actually about soloing, but the first few minutes provide a very thorough method for relating triads to a 7th chord.

Playing a Jazz Standard using Triad voicings

In this lesson, I am going to show you how you can get started with some triad voicings. Starting with what you already know and then go over 5 levels, step-by-step, of how you can play some great sounding comping ideas using these amazing voicings.

Applying Triad voicings to a Jazz Blues

This lesson is going over how you find triad voicings for a C jazz blues. You will also learn what you can do with the voicings you find using melodies and inversions.

 

Other great 3-note Jazz Voicings to Add To Your Vocabulary

When you think about Jazz Chords then you are probably thinking about rich chords with a lot of beautiful extensions. Of course, the rich colors of Jazz are about having chords that are embellished like this. At the same time when you are playing Jazz and when you are comping then you also want to have flexible chords so that you can move from one to the next, create small melodies and 3-note chords are fantastic for this.

 

Using less common Triad choices on a Maj7 chord

This video is going over 6 triads that I use for my Cmaj7 voicings and will also demonstrate how you can use them in a II V I cadence in C major. At the end of the video, I go over 4 more triads that are a bit tricky to use but also yield more interesting sounds!

Let me know what you think!

These videos give you a path to work on using triads and becoming very flexible with them, is there something you are missing or maybe something else you would like to see?

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Sign up for my newsletter – Get the II V I Ebook

 

 

How To Use Arpeggios in Jazz – Study Guide

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You can learn how to play Jazz lines and use arpeggios to nail the chords in your solos using the material in this guide.

A Core Part of playing Jazz is using Arpeggios and following the Harmony or Chord Progression of the song that you are improvising over. These videos will help you get started with that.

The Most Important Scale Exercise In Jazz

You probably already practice arpeggios, but chances are you can do it as a better Scale exercise than what you are doing now, and that is what I want to talk about in this video. Jazz Scale Exercises should be about giving you the material you can use in your solos and help you know and play the different arpeggios and melodies found in the scale.

When you improvise in Jazz then the lines or melodies that you play are related to the chords you are playing over and the solo follows the chord progression it is played over. One easy way to do this is to use the arpeggios of each chord.

You can use the arpeggio of the chord you are playing over, but in fact, there are more options than this and the exercise in this lesson will help you tie all of that together in one exercise.

Get the PDF here: The Most Important Scale Exercise In Jazz

 

How to start soloing over a II V I with arpeggios

In this lesson I will take a II V I give you some arpeggios and an approach to make melodies over the progression so that you clearly follow the chords. I also wrote a few examples of the licks using the arps to give you some ideas.

Arpeggios are one of the best ways to directly connect what you are playing with the chord changes that you are improvising. This will help you easily play inside the changes.

Get the PDF here: How to start soloing over a II V I with arpeggios

 

7 Great Jazz Licks And Why You Need To Know Basic Arpeggios

You need to know your basics and you need to know them extremely well. I am sure you have heard that before. Once in awhile it very useful to go back to the basics and really improve the jazz licks that you can write with very simple and basic scale and arpeggios choices.

When you do that then you are working on being better at using rhythm, make stronger melodies, and have better phrasing, and you always want to improve that.

In the end, it is more important to improve those skills instead of knowing a lot of scales and arpeggios.

Get The PDF here: 7 Great Jazz Licks And Why You Need To Know Basic Arpeggios

 

Autumn Leaves – Soloing with Arpeggios – Jazz Guitar lesson

Autumn Leaves is a great way to start improvising following the harmony because it’s a well-known tune and it still covers a lot of important cadences in a key. In this lesson, Iw will go over a set of arpeggios in one position, some exercises, target notes, and strategies for making solos where you can hear the harmony in the improvisation.

Get the PDF here: Autumn Leaves – Soloing with Arpeggios – Jazz Guitar lesson

5 Ways You Need To Know And Practice Your Arpeggios

Arpeggios are a huge part of improvising over changes in jazz guitar and especially in the more bop oriented styles. When we improvise we use arpeggios to connect to the harmony and spell out interesting extensions or alterations.

This video is going to discuss 5 ways to practice arpeggios so that you get as much as possible out of practicing arpeggios and that you also make sure to make music with them.

The video also has a few extra examples for working on creating more intervallic or modern-sounding licks or solos. There are a few ways to achieve this, one of the ones that I like to use is experimenting with turning chords into solo lines and in that way access some larger intervals.

 

How To Analyze Songs – Music Theory and Functional Harmony

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Music Theory and Harmonic Analysis can be great tools when you want to learn jazz and figure out how to improvise over a chord progression. These videos help you get started understanding how to do that, understanding functional harmony, tonal centers, and the rich harmonic language found in Jazz standards.

The videos will give you examples of how to analyze songs and also how to choose scales from that analysis. You will learn a lot from analyzing the songs that you play.

Remember that it is more important to hear the changes and recognize the sound of the theory as it is to know the name, so working on the songs you already know well will really help you. A fancy name probably won’t.

Analyzing Jazz Standards – Understand what you play!

How To Analyze Chords and Progressions – This video uses the song There Will Never Be Another You as an example and discusses the progressions found in there.

All The Things You Are – Harmonic Analysis – All The Things You Are is a great Jazz standard that we all need to have in our repertoire. In this video I am going to go over a thorough All The Things You Are Harmonic Analysis.

Analyzing a Standard: All Of Me – This song is a great example of IV minor chords and secondary dominants

Analyzing a Standard – Stella By Starlight – Functional Harmony in Jazz – I guess Stella by Starlight is in many ways one of the most mysterious chord progressions among the jazz standards. At the same time, it is so beautiful that everybody just keeps at it until they can play it

General videos on Music Theory and Analysis

Secondary Dominants – What You Want To Know Understanding what a secondary dominant is and being able to recognize or find them for chords is a powerful tool you can use in your playing and compositions. This video will show you how to use them, understand them and improvise over them

And actually, it is pretty simple if you know your basic scales.

Jazz Scales! The 3 You Need to practice and How You apply them to Jazz Chords – Jazz Scales can seem like a million options that you all need to learn in all positions and all chords, but there is a way to approach this that is a little easier than trying to learn all jazz scales in all modes. After all the Dorian mode is not as important as the Major or Minor key.

This video has a PDF download of the overview of the analysis – Click Here 

5 Types of Chord Progressions You Need To Recognize and Be Able To Play – Harmonic Analysis – In this video, I will go over 5 types of progressions that if you can use to better understand the functional harmony that you find in a jazz standard.

Music Theory Is The Effective Way For You To Learn Faster – If you know you basic Music Theory well then you can easily start to add another level to how you analyze melodies and chord progressions which will help you work more focused and learn faster when you practice.

 

You can also go through the playlistson YouTube:

Analyzing a Jazz Standard – Harmonic analysis of Jazz Pieces

 

 

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F Jazz Blues – Study Guide

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This study guide will give you a row of lessons to check out how to solo on an F Jazz Blues. The material will cover basic and advanced chords and voicings, arpeggios, scales and also some of the things to check out if you want to work on being able to play better melodies in your solos.

The 12 bar blues is an essential part of the Jazz Repertoire. The F Jazz Blues is probably the most common key. Famous pieces like Straight No Chaser, Billie’s Bounce and Au Privave are most know themes played in F. 

Your Feedback is very valuable

Remember that the guides are here to help you so if you have suggestions for this or other guides then let me know! I might have missed something or you have another idea for something that is important to check out! Feel free to send me an e-mail or message via social media.

I have also collected the videos in a Playlist on Youtube if you prefer that:

Playlist: F Jazz Blues YouTube Playlist

Check out the other study guides here: Study Guides For Jazz Guitar

The Jazz Blues Survival Kit: Basic Scales and Chords + an Etude

The first three lessons deal with a basic chord vocabulary and how to use it when playing important chord progressions and jazz standards

Expanding your chord vocabulary

Where the basic clear voicings are presented in the previous section you can move on to a higher level by checking out these two lessons. 

The first is directly continuing with the material from the Survival kit and the second is introducing Drop2 voicings.

Arpeggios and Soloing

The best place to begin with soloing and expanding on it when approaching the blues from a bebop perspective is probably to check out the arpeggios. Being able to play the harmony is very important and a very solid foundation to build on.

The Blues in Jazz also has a specific language that is worth checking out. Adding this on top or next to your bop vocabulary is very useful. This video goes over 5 examples of lines mixing these two traditions.

Developing Phrasing for both chords and solos

Playing Chords does require more than just knowing what chord to play where. Some of the other parts of phrasing chords on a blues are dealt with in this lesson. The lesson is not using an F blues as an example, but the information in it will greatly help you get a good hard-bop blues vibe.

More Modern sounds

There are also more modern approaches that you can apply to an F Blues. Quartal Harmony and Pentatonic sounds are very common devices in Modern Jazz.

Chord Solos

Chord Solos is a must in mainstream jazz and this lesson goes over how to work on playing chord solos on an F blues by demonstrating a chorus and giving some exercises to develop your own chord vocabulary that is aimed at playing chord solos

Learn more about Jazz Blues

If you are looking for more extensive turtorials and examples you can check out some of the examples in my WebStore in the Blues category

https://jenslarsen.nl/product/f-jazz-blues-arpeggio-workout/

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More Resources

If you want to have more resources available then you can also check out these lessons from my webstore with longer examples, exercises and analysis of material on an F Jazz Blues

How To Play Walking Bass and Chords on Guitar – Study Guide

Walking bass and Chords is probably the coolest way to comp in a duo setting. There are several skills needed when it comes to playing like this. You need to be able to play basslines and have some ability to add chords while still laying down a solid groove with the Walking Bass.

This list of lessons is an ordered way to work your way through this from getting to know a basic vocabulary to having more freedom in comping with different types of chord voicings.

Your Feedback is very valuable

Remember that the guides are here to help you so if you have suggestions for this or other guides then let me know! I might have missed something or you have another idea for something that is important to check out! Feel free to send me an e-mail or message via social media.

I have also collected the videos in a Playlist on Youtube if you prefer that:

Walking Bass and Chords – Basic techniques and basslines

These lessons take a look at some fundamental ways to write walking bass melodies and present some exercises to help you play a bassline while placing the chords in different places.

Basic Progressions to check out

An important part of learning to play and make your own walking bass lines is to check out examples on songs. Here below is a list of lessons demonstrating this technique on a few songs:

Start with a Blues:

Solar is another 12 bar form in a minor key:

All the Things You are is a good example of a longer form that spans several keys and has a lot of different diatonic progressions

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How to Learn to Play Jazz Chords – Study Guide

You want to learn how to play Jazz Chords. An important part of playing Jazz is to be able to interpret and play the rich chord language of the genre. This list of lessons is an ordered way to work your way through this from getting to know a basic vocabulary to have more freedom in comping with different types of chord voicings.

Your Feedback is very valuable

Remember that the guides are here to help you so if you have suggestions for this or other guides then let me know! I might have missed something or you have another idea for something that is important to check out! Feel free to send me an e-mail or message via social media.

I have also collected the videos in a Playlist on Youtube if you prefer that:

Playlist: How to Learn to Play Jazz Chords – Study Guide

Check out the other study guides here: Study Guides For Jazz Guitar

The Jazz Chord Survival Kit and vocabulary

The first three lessons deal with a basic chord vocabulary and how to use it when playing important chord progressions and jazz standards

Leaving out the root and getting used to upper-structures

Once you know some chords and can play a few songs you can start to expand your vocabulary.

There are two main topics you should add first: Triads as Jazz chord voicings and Drop2 voicings. These two are the foundation for most other voicings and you can build on this knowledge to really build an extensive chord vocabulary.

The Essential Drop2 Voicings

Drop2 chords form a huge chunk of all the voicings that are used in jazz. These lessons will take you through a lot of material using drop2 voicings. If you want to hear Drop2 chords in action then just put on a Wes Montgomery album, he used them extensively in his chord solos and comping.

Developing Comping skills beyond the chords

Playing Chords does require more than just knowing what chord to play where. Some of the other skills that are equally important are discussed in these lessons:

More Modern sounds

If we look beyond the triads and Drop2 voicings it is of course possible to start checking out more modern sounds that may not immediately be covered in the lessons I already included. These voicings are both more extreme with having large intervals or much more cluster like with second intervals:

Allan Holdsworth Chord Series

One of my favorite players when it comes to modern jazz chords is Allan Holdsworth. Since I have made several lessons inspired by his chordal language I though it only right to include some of these lessons. 
I am obviously a huge fan, but there is a lot to be learned from him and the chords are very beautiful and worthwhile checking out. Even if they are not all easy to play.

Chord Solos

One way of getting good at comping is to get good at playing chord solos. Being able to improvise solos with chords really helps develop your freedom and ability to play solid comping behind others. 

For that reason I have included a few of the lessons I have on chord soloing that you can dig into if you want to take this approach.

Comping skills on real songs

If you want to really get better at comping and work on improving how you make it all sound like music and beautiful progressions then check out this collection of lessons:

Comping – Putting It All Together

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