Jazz guitar and especially jazz chords can feel like a maze of endless options , and many beginners feel overwhelmed.
Having taught Jazz for more than 20 years, I’ve seen that often. But In this video, I will show you 3 things to get right when learning jazz chords, making it a lot simpler and helping you play a lot better. This is stuff I wish someone had shared with me when I started because it helps you think about chords in the right way, play better rhythms, and get you started with chord melody.
The first thing might seem strange, but it will make sense once you zoom out!
Ignore The Extensions!
I remember the first times I was introduced to Jazz chords and how exciting it was to hear these rich sounds with all the extensions.
That is a huge part of what is great about the chords, but when you are playing, you don’t want to think about it like that at all.
The problem is that you have a lot of options when it comes to which notes you include in the chord,
and nobody has time to think about 15 different types of G7 while playing a song. I certainly remember the stress of trying to keep up with the song and figuring out how to play the chord. That never works. Instead you start by thinking a basic chord, so just a G7, and you think of a sound of that chord. In this case, you can think of a G7 as a basic V chord in C major.
There are two advantages to this. You think of G7, and if you are here on the neck (example 2), then you have these notes available
that you can add to the chord, so instead of many chords, you have variations of one chord.
The other reason why that is important is that you can turn the G7 into a phrase:
and you are just thinking G7, you don’t have to think 4 different chords with different extensions.
What you think is a G7 chord with a melody.
Clearly, it is a lot less complicated to think 1 chord, not 3, and all you have to be aware of is that it is a G7 in C major; it is not as important exactly what these notes are in the melody or exactly what extensions are used. And you can make it even easier to play! As a beginner, this is a good 3-step plan if you are learning a song.
Step #1 Basic Chords
Start by learning the basic chords. If we use the A-part of “Take The A-train”,
Then you have these voicings:
Step #2 Rootless voicings
To make it easier to play and add melody to the chords, you can choose to play them as rootless voicings:
Here you get:
Step #3 Melody
Now, it is easier to add melody notes, and in the beginning, try a few notes. You don’t need that much while comping, anyway. It is not a chord solo. For these chords, you can try 3 or 4 notes like this:
Then, you can start using this for the song. The first few bars could sound like this:
Remember that if you are not playing in a band, you can use the complete chords to make the harmony clear or switch between voicings with a root and rootless voicings to stay flexible.
Let’s move on to some rhythm, where I will also tell you to do the opposite of what you expect,
Rhythm is Melody!
Another topic that I found incredibly difficult in the beginning was learning some rhythms to use when I was comping. I spent much time listening to piano players like Herbie Hancock and Wynton Kelly, but learning rhythms always seemed difficult and abstract. The place to start is learning a few basic short rhythms like the Charleston:
And maybe a variation like this shifted Charleston pattern:
Or you add a note to the Charleston to create a variation:
But what makes you better at comping and comping rhythms is more about the bigger picture and thinking in those terms. And you can train yourself to hear rhythms that fit together.
I will give you two exercises to work with. To keep it simple, let’s stick to a single chord: Cmaj7.
The Riff Exercise
Start with what I call the riff exercise, which may not be the first thing you think of with Jazz comping. A riff repeats, but often, you add a variation at the end of a period to avoid it becoming boring. This is similar to how drummers add a fill at the end of a 4-bar period. The way to practice hearing better rhythms in this exercise is by repeating a rhythm you already know. Let’s take the shifted Charleston. I’ll play that 3 times.
In the 4th bar, you can stop, listen, and imagine a rhythm that might work. It is okay to just try a few and see what you like. The point is that you listen to what you feel might fit and try to play that.
could work, or maybe
Repeating the same rhythm several times makes it much clearer and gives you more of an idea of what to keep and change. Often, if you play a very sparse riff with 1 or 2 notes like this, it is easier to have a more busy variation at the end.
Even though it is about rhythm, exploring this exercise out of time is fine, so repeat the first rhythm a few times and then take your time trying out a conclusion to finish the 4-bar period. Composing as a way to train your ears is also useful with comping rhythms. Doing this exercise: You are expanding your vocabulary of rhythms, but what is just as important is that you are learning to connect the rhythms and make them into real music. Rhythm is the most important part of what makes comping sound melodic. You should also not underestimate how useful it can be to be good at taking a riff through some changes and, in that way, create a very stable background for a soloist to improvise over. That is a skill that can get you quite a few gigs. Let’s add another exercise and then get to chord melody.
Conversational Comping
The next level to this exercise is to start making everything you play a conversation, so instead of repeating one rhythm several times, you now play a single rhythm and try to hear and play a response to that. Again it makes sense to explore this out of tempo to get used to how it feels and develop a basic concept. So start simple. Here’s a call with G7:
And maybe this is a good response:
So the whole phrase is
Again, this is about coming up with rhythms that fit together as a phrase, and once you have something like this, you can even add melody:
Just keep exploring and developing new rhythms and melodies. From playing out of time, you can move on to playing in a slow tempo, but don’t start with ballad tempos, medium slow swing is probably more useful in the beginning, and use really simple calls like this example with the Charleston rhythm
Let’s look at some chord melodies because they are also incredibly useful for comping and are not as difficult as you might think.
The Most Beautiful Chord Skill!
Even in its most basic form, taking a song and turning it into a complete orchestrated piece of music is super cool. It is also a great exercise for many useful chord skills. You figure out what the melody notes are over the chord, you explore the neck to find the most playable solution for both melody and chords, and you play the most important part of the song: the melody.
Knowing where the melody is becomes useful when you comp because you don’t always want to double it or have notes in your chord that clash with it.
The basic method for turning a song into a chord melody arrangement is incredibly simple. I’ll use the beginning of the Jazz Standard “Someday My Prince Will Come” as an example.
First, try to learn the melody on the two top strings.
Mainly because that makes it easier to put chords under it on the remaining four strings.
Notice that there are still quite a few ways to place the notes on 2 strings, and you need to be a little flexible with this.
Now, you can explore adding chords under the melody, and I am using basic shell-voicings here.
Under the F you have this Bbmaj7,
And under the high Bb it is easy to add a D7
The Ebmaj7 here works well for the chords, but the A is then a stretch so you move that to the 1st string.
The G in the melody can easily be covered with this G7
Cm7 fits under that same G and we can steal the voicings from D7 to fix the G7 bar
Once you go through the song, it is not that difficult with a bit of exploration as long as you can move the melody to the 2 top strings.
Knowing the melody like this can help you both support a soloist and also get out of the way in the right places, and you learn the sound of the harmony so much better when you connect it to the melody like this.
You can do many things with the melody and the harmony in the chord melody. Once you start exploring all the possibilities for adding what Joe Pass describes as “movement” to your playing. I talk about that in this video, which will help you add some of those skills that give your chord melody and chord playing an extra dimension and can make the harmony flow beautifully. Check it out!
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