Jazz Chords – I Wish Every Beginner Would Watch This!
You’ve probably already figured out that playing jazz chords is about more than just memorizing diagrams. When you listen to Joe Pass, it’s obvious—there’s a lot more going on.
But what skills do you actually need in your jazz chord toolkit? I’ve been teaching jazz guitar for more than 20 years, and in this video, I’ll show you how to build those skills, so you don’t end up stuck just stringing together random chord grips.
I am going to take a basic turnaround and step-by-step go from this:
to this:
#1 Begin With The Right Voicing
The first skill you need is to be able to play the chords as simple but clear voicings. The place to start here is shell voicings, 3-note voicings that nail the sound of the chord with root, 3rd and 7th.
Shell voicings have the root on the 5th or 6th string and the 3rd and the 7th on the middle string set.
Each voicing has two variations: this Cmaj7 with the root on the 5th string and this Cmaj7 with a 6th-string root.
For the turnaround, we can start with these easy chords:
Before we move on to adding rhythm, if you want to explore the shell-voicings in more detail, you can check out the two exercises I included in the article on my website. They take the chords through a scale, something that is useful for most chords and chord types. They are also in the Free PDF download for this lesson.
#2 Jazz Is Rhythm
The next skill is Rhythm, jazz is not just Harmony. The place you want to start is to be able to lay down a groove yourself. Try to imagine a basic Jazz groove and play some simple rhythms over that groove with the chords you just learned, and in the next example, pay attention to the length of the notes:
As you probably heard, in Jazz, you often play short chords with a beginning and an end because they connect better with the rhythm, compared to long chords that just fade out without any definition.
The first exercise you can use to develop your vocabulary is composing rhythms for this turnaround. Like this, you don’t want to play each chord more than once or twice, and you only have 4 places you can place them.
If you start experimenting, you will easily find some good rhythms you can add to your playing. Here’s another variation, and then I’ll show you how to add another dimension to these chords:
A bonus part of using Shell voicings is the built-in split. You have a natural split between the bass note and the chord. It’s like having a bass drum and a snare drum to comp with.
Check out how that sounds in this example. It is perfect for comping in a duo setting, and using that split will also make bossanova and samba a lot easier to play:
As you can hear, you are laying down a complete groove like this. Now we can start adding some notes to the chords!
#3 Melody, Not Just Extensions
With some rhythms in your playing, there is more room to add color and melody. A common beginner mistake is to focus only on the numbers, so the chord extensions. Probably, because Jazz is thought of as having complicated chords. But you don’t want to focus on the chords as vertically isolated things:
because jazz is about having harmony flow from one chord to the next.
Instead, you want to learn how to put them together in progressions and connect them. One of the strongest ways to have that connection, you just heard it, is with the melody.
Instead of just finding colorful extensions, you are better off looking for options for melodies. I usually think of this as a small scale built around the chord. Like this:
The Cmaj7 shell voicing already has the 3rd on top as a melody note. If you add the next string you can also use a 5th, G and a 13th A.
Don’t think fo these as 3 different voicings, just as variations of the same Cmaj7
And try to use these notes to create melodies. Something like this, and notice how I just use the basic Cmaj7 in the diagram.
For the A7, this is a secondary dominant, so a chord that is added to pull us to Dm7, and you treat that as a dominant from D minor (since it resolves to Dm7) which means it is a dominant with a b9.
The Dm7 already has the F as a melody note:
And you can also add the 11th, G, and the 5th. Since the notes you are adding are all on the B string, you can already tell that it will be fairly easy to connect the melody notes across the chords.
The G7 has the same melody notes as Dm7, which makes that even easier:
F, G and A.
With this, you already have a lot to work with in turning the chords into music. Check out how this example also allows the melody notes to work independently, similar to how the bass note was allowed to be independent in the previous section.
You can go further with this, but for that, you need to build skills with rootless chords. But before we get to that skill, let’s check out this bonus skill, which is easier with simple chords but sounds amazing.
Bonus: The Full Groove
Walking bass with chords is a bit of a specialized skill, but it’s also one of the most fun ways to comp, and it just sounds incredibly cool. The good news is—you already know the chords we’re using here:
For this progression with two chords per bar, you only need two bass notes per chord, one of which is the root.
The point of the other bass note is to lead to the next root. A great way to start is using a chord tone, so the G moving up to the A, and the E moving down to the D. Chord tones are nice and clear, and don’t get in the way.
On the G7, I am adding a quick chromatic note to go to C, and that is another option.
Chromatic leading notes pull more towards the resolution. You hear that with the Bb going down to A, and the final Db resolving to C.
The chord voicings are all basic shell voicings, but you can still explore different rhythms with them. Start with just playing on the beat on the new chord, since that is pretty easy
Once you can do that, try to play the chord right after the chord change on 1& and 3&. This helps get the swing feel across in your groove. The last chord also demonstrates how to play the chord twice.
Now, you can mix that up a bit and gradually develop your playing using chord tones, chromatic bass notes, and different rhythms with the chords.
Let’s get back to comping and rootless voicings!
#4 Less IS More (Also For Jazz Comping)
I don’t think Yngwie Malmsteen is watching my videos, but in this case, making the chords smaller does give you a lot more options! And Yngwie, if you are watching: The next section will go back to “more is more”, so just skip ahead.
You just saw how keeping chords basic made it easier to move the bass around. But what if you want more color and more options for melody? That’s where rootless voicings come in. Because when you drop the root, you literally free up a finger to do something more interesting.
Check out these voicings where I have already added a note to the chord, as we did in the previous section:
Let’s take away the root to get that:
See how that instantly frees things up? This makes it easier to add melody with the notes you already have from section 3
What I’m doing here is still melody-focused comping, but now I’m keeping it really practical and playable by leaving out the root.
What you have here are these notes around Cmaj7:
For A7 you could use this:
And keep in mind that you should go with what you find playable, these are my examples, feel free to add or take out notes to make it easier for you. Here’s Dm7 which has a lot of notes:
And the G7 is very similar:
And when you use these, then mix up the 3 and 4-note versions of the chords:
But you can also start adding entire chords to the mix, so let’s explore some passing chords!
#5 More Is ALSO More!
For this video, the principle for adding passing chords is actually very simple—but super effective: You add a dominant chord a half step above the chord you’re going to, and we’re keeping those dominants unaltered.
As an example: The progression moves from Cmaj7 to A7, and you can add a Bb7 as a passing chord here,
And another one that I will explain after the example:
The other passing chord was the Ab7, taking us to G7.
If you were to analyze these dominant passing chords, they would be considered tritone substitutions, but that is not that important for how you use them here.
You can also add a Db7 before Cmaj7:
Real Comping Skills
You can hear how much life this adds to the progression!
But to really develop your comping—not just the chords, but the groove, the melody, and the feel—then you need to think about how everything fits together. Because just knowing the chords isn’t enough.
I discuss exercises for developing those skills in this video on “The 3 Rules of Playing Jazz Chords”
Check it out!
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