Make Sure You Learn These 3 Things First – Jazz Guitar
Learning Jazz guitar is overwhelming and chaotic when you are starting out. There are 1000s of things to learn, and the most difficult part is not practicing and playing, it is figuring out what to work.
I have taught Jazz for almost 20 years, and there are 3 basic things you need to focus on in the beginning to ensure you stay motivated and don’t overcomplicate Jazz.
I’ll begin with some soloing stuff, then some chords, and finally the third skill that most students and teachers should pay more attention to because it is both important and practical, plus you hear it in almost any Jazz solo.
#1 Avoid The Scale Madness
Jazz has the reputation of being a style of music that requires 100s of scales. That is not true, and teachers who make you start there are not helping you learn to play. You want to keep it simple and work towards connecting to the music, not just scale practice, and this is something that you have a method for.
I am pretty sure you know which scale to start with, but It may still disappoint some that the pentatonic scale isn’t enough. The sound that you think of when you think of a Jazz lick is not what you get from the pentatonic scale. That sounds like this:
Compared to a Bebop-inspired line, there are just some things that are not there in the pentatonic scale:
So, how do you start working towards that sound?
You want to start with the Major Scale. In the end, you can play most Jazz music using just 3 scales, but the Major scale is the most important one. There are many songs that you can work on just by knowing that, but you need to make sure to learn the right exercises connected to the major scale.
Since I mentioned that you only need 3 scales, Let me explain that: I am talking about Major, Harmonic, and Melodic minor. I have another video about that,but if you are not yet playing jazz songs, then that is not what you should focus on. It’s a lot of theory. This video will be much more practical and useful right now.
Learn The Right Things The Fast Way
Now you are probably wondering how to practice the major scale. I’ll show you quickly how to build this up but you will need to do the work yourself, to get it into your fingers and into you ears.
The basic chord type in Jazz is a 7th chord, and you want to connect the major scale to the 7th chord,
and you do that by learning the 7th chord arpeggios in the scale, which is also called the diatonic 7th chords.
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This is also why I often refer to that exercise as the most important scale exercise in Jazz. The main reason for not playing arpeggios as separate positions is that you don’t need that when you are soloing.
Most Jazz licks only use 1-octave arpeggios, and you don’t play the arpeggio by itself. It is usually placed in line with other notes from the scale, so you might as well practice it like that.
Luckily, you can ease into it with a step-wise set of exercises. The first step is easy:
#1 Play the scale:
Instead of going directly to the 7th chord arpeggios then you can start with the interval that the arpeggios are constructed from:
#2 The Diatonic 3rds
Like the next exercise, these are useful for you to become more flexible with the scale, and you need these intervals in your solos anyway. If you stack two diatonic 3rd intervals, you get a triad, another structure you want in your ears and fingers since it is incredibly useful for soloing. Now, it also makes sense to name the triads in the exercise, which I did, as you can see in this example:
#3 Diatonic Triads
Like this, you are gradually building your technique and getting this into your ears to make it easy to play the next exercise,
which you get when you add another 3rd interval to the triads: The Diatonic 7th chord arpeggios.
#4 Diatonic 7th Chords
This exercise helps you with several important things:
You have arpeggios for all the chords in the song so that you can play solos that really nail the changes, but what is just as powerful is that you can also learn to use several different arpeggios over a chord and, in that way, have many options for great lines over every chord, check out how much you can do with that in this short example:
Once you can play the diatonic arpeggios as an exercise, go through a song and play the arpeggio of each chord.
You also want to develop vocabulary by making licks with arpeggios and, of course, checking out how other people are using these arpeggios, something I’ll return to later.
But of course, it is not all soloing. If you want to solo over chords, you also need to be able to play the chords so that you know how they sound!
#2 The Jazz Harmony Foundation
Jazz beginners waste a lot of time learning different voicings and lots of inversions without being able to play songs or do anything with all that material. Sadly, this is a very common problem. You should start with jazz chords, which is similar to how you start with scales and arpeggios. The songs you play are in a key, and most of the chords in the song are just the diatonic chords of the scale. That is where you want to begin.
Instead of starting with complicated chords with lots of extensions then, it is 1000x better to start with a foundation that you can later add more color to and focus on chords you can easily use to play songs and hear the harmony.
The chords you want to start with are the Shell-voicings. Easy, Complete, and flexible 3-note voicings for 7th chords. Usually, a 7th 4 has four notes, but in this case, the shell voicings leave out the 5th of the chord.
Shell-voicings have two variations.
One with the root on the 6th string, then 7th and 3rd, and one with the root on the 5th string, where you have 3rd and then 7th. The chord tones are on the middle string set, and the roots are on the lower string set, which is very useful, as you will see in a few seconds.
With the shell-voicings you also want to learn these in the scale. That way, you learn a group of chords that also work together in songs, which helps you play music. For C major, you have these diatonic chords:
And you want to check these out with the root on the 6th string as well, here I start on the 4th note of the scale, so with an Fmaj7, but I am still playing the diatonic chords of C major:
With these two sets of chords then, things get easier to play because they fit together so a II V I in C major could be played as:
and also like this:
And you, of course, also want to use these to play through chord progressions to get the song’s sound into your ears. To give you an idea about how to do that, here’s a bit of the Ellington/Strayhorn classic Satin Doll:
I have another video that goes over that process, which you can check out:
Later you can start to expand on the chords by adding notes, melody and turning them into rootless voicings. I have another video that goes over that process, which you can check out, I’ll link to it in the description. But first, I think, you want to check out this skill which is often left out but is essential to develop, because it is at the very core of the Jazz sound.
#3 The Jazz Flow
If you start learning Jazz, you will quickly hear someone tell you that Bach sounds like Bebop, and there is a reason.
When you listen to a Jazz solo like the Charlie Parker solo I showed earlier, you can see how the lines move towards strong chord tones on the downbeat,
giving the solo direction and a lot of forward-moving energy because the melody is always pushing ahead. This is probably one of the things you like about Jazz if you think about it.
This type of flow is also found in Bach’s fairly dense melodies, which is why those two are connected so often.
But if you are starting out and learning how to play the right notes over each chord, then you are probably not thinking about how the solo flows and are more focused on finding and playing the right notes on each chord. That means that a solo on a Blues In F sounds something like this:
I am making it worse than it actually is, but I am sure you get the idea. What is missing is that you start using the notes of the chord you are on to get to the next chord, similar to what Charlie Parker (or anybody else you check out) does. I’ll give you a great resource for this in a bit. It should sound more like this:
I will show you a simple method to incorporate this into your solos, but you should also listen to a lot of solos and maybe consider playing some good Jazz etudes like the exercises in the Joe Pass Guitar Style book. That is a great way to hear this in action. The description includes a link to the book and the video I made about it.
Let’s check out how to practice towards a real Jazz flow!
Fixing Your Jazz Blues Flow
This is not magic, and it is very much something you can learn. You need to take the notes on one chord and make a melody with them that points to a note in the next chord,
often referred to as the target note.
This makes your solo sound great because it has a natural flow where the melodies lock in with the chords. It makes sense—it is not random notes over chords because they are going somewhere. Your solo also puts the chord tones on the strong beats in the rhythm so that the harmony is very clear, and you can hear chords change and what chords are in there, even without any backing.
- Natural Flow
- Logical Melodies
- Clear Harmony
A simple example to get started would be something like this: If you are practicing to improvise over the F blues, then a basic version of this is to take the arpeggios of F7 and Bb7:
The easiest note to make the chord sound clear is the 3rd, so you want to start by using the 3rd of Bb7, D, as a target note.
Now try to make a melody with the F7 arpeggio that ends on the D, like this:
When you play like this, there is a connection between the two chords. It doesn’t sound like different notes on different chords; it sounds like a melody, and you can clearly hear the chord change.
Of course, you want to explore different ways to play lines like this, even with a simple set of notes like the 4 chord tones of each chord:
But of course, it is difficult to make interesting solos if you are limited to only using 1-octave arpeggios. For this to work, you must add other things to make your solo sound more interesting. You can work on using the same building blocks and melodic techniques that Charlie Parker or Joe Pass use in their playing. Jazz is a rich language and you can get very creative with the melodies in your solos, that is a next logical step after starting to work on these 3 skills, and I talk about that in this video which will give you a great foundation for developing your lines and make your solos sound like Jazz! Check it out!
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