You need to play the chords and you also need to improvise and play some great Riffs when you are comping. This video builds a set of Autumn Leaves Chords that connects different Jazz Chords to give you something you can use to improvise with.
A lot of the time when you practice you think you need to learn completely new things, but often it is much more efficient to make new connections and find better ways to use what you already know. And become much more flexible if you can mix the different things you know like drop2 and shell-voicings for example. So That is also the way I am going to build the material in this lesson.
I am using Autumn Leaves as an example because that is a very common standard and covers a lot of ground with chords, so it is a perfect example for teaching jazz chords in a guitar lesson.
Autumn Leaves Chords – Basic Shell-Voicings
Let’s start with a set of basic Shell-voicings for the first 8 bars of Autumn Leaves. If you want more information on Shell-voicings then check out this very old lesson (in fact my first YouTube Lesson) The basic construction of a Shell-voicing is either 1 7 3 (as on Cm7) or 1 3 7 (as on F7).
The first place to go is to take the shells and leave out the root, so the lowest note:
Rootless Shell-voicings or Guide-Tone Chords
In this lesson, you don’t need to use the root, and you also want to be more flexible to add more things on top of the voicings so let’s take away the bass note:
Adding notes to create 3-note chords
Now we have two-note voicings that are easy to add extra material to. The first step is to add the notes on the next string, so the B string.
That is shown here below:
Keep in mind that I am trying to be practical and I am only adding notes that I think are useful and easy to play. You should do the same and it may differ from what I do. Keep it practical!
A Comping Example using the 2 and 3-note jazz chords
An example of what you now can do already with this simple set of voicings is shown below:
From Triads to Drop 2 Voicings
Notice that the 3-note voicings are often Triads and you can add the notes on the high E string as well and that will mostly give us Drop 2 voicings (Check out the explanation of Drop voicings here)
Adding the extra notes gives you these voicings:
Combining all the voicings
Putting this to use on the song would give you an example like this:
Combining and Embellishing Chords on a Blues
If you want to check out a more in-depth application of this on a 12-bar Blues in Bb then have a look at this WebStore lesson:
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