Tag Archives: jazz guitar rhythm

3 Ways To Make Simple Jazz Chords Sound Amazing

Few things in the world sound as great as Jazz Chords, but learning a few grips doesn’t mean that you get them to sound right, so in this video, I will show you some very simple Jazz chords, and then show you how you make them sound great in actual songs because I have a few easy tricks to do that which are effective when it comes to the important things: rhythm, phrasing and sound.

The First Jazz Chords To Learn

With this simple Jazz chord type, you can do everything that you need to do with Jazz chords when it comes to spelling out the harmony, rhythm voice-leading, bass movement, and chromaticism.

I am of course talking about Shell-voicings. These 3- note chords:

A shell-voicing has a root which is usually on the 5th or 6th string

and then the 3rd and 7th of the chord on 3rd and 4th string.

You have a version with the root on the 5th string and one with the root on the 6th string.

So for each of these, you can play a basic II V I in two positions.

and higher on the neck:

As you probably noticed, this way of playing chords leaves out the 5th but that is something you can use, you’ll see that later.

Split Up The Chord!

What we as Jazz guitarists often forget is that you don’t have to play chords with all the notes at the same time.

Instead, you can use that shell-voicings naturally have two layers: Bass and chords.

You can play like this with a pick, but it is easier to get it to sound right if you play with your fingers.

This opens up for a lot of options in terms of rhythm, and later I’ll show you a great variation of this that goes even further, but first check out how great it sounds on Autumn Leaves:

More Bass Notes?

As I mentioned at the beginning of the video the shell-voicings leave out the 5th, but it is also an option to play the 5th instead of the root, and that can sound great, so for Dm7 you go from the basic version

And all that you do is just move a finger to another string.

This works great, especially for II Vs, even when I am only using one variation of them. Check out how it sounds on There Will Never Be Another You:

Playing the chords like this is a great way to start working towards walking bass lines, but I will get to that later. You probably noticed that I am only using this for the 5th string version, but you can do that for the 6th string bass note chords as well, it is just a bit more work so maybe you want to add those later:

Like this, you have a way to add rhythm to the chords, and voice-leading, and some bass movement is taken care of, and I’ll level that up the bass part in a bit. You can also add some great movement and surprising sounds with chromatic chords, which is surprisingly simple!

No-Theory Passing Chords

The chromatic part of Jazz is often hidden in a lot of music theory and with all sorts of explanations like secondary tritone substitutions, harmonized basslines, reharmonized dim chords, and stuff like that, but you don’t need to make it that complicated!

The point of the chromatic chords is just to create some tension that then resolves on the next chord,

and that just means that you can create a chromatic chord by moving a chord a half step up or down,

so for the first four bars of Sonny Rollins’ Pent Up House I could use this G#m7 to lead to Am7

and maybe Eb7 to resolve down to D7.

Of course, I am not really thinking about what chord it is as much as just shifting up or down a fret. Check out how great that sounds, also adding a bit of bass movement:

Let’s add a bit of walking bass as well.

Take A Walk!

You can build this coming from what I already covered using the 5th of the chord as an alternative bass note, so if we start with something like this using Autumn Leaves:

Then you have two of the 4 notes you need per bar simply by using the root and the 5th. Now adding notes is just a matter of adding chord tones, scale notes, or leading notes, and here the emphasis is mostly on making it playable.

A bonus is that often the chromatic leading notes in the bass also automatically become great chromatic passing chords:

Adding Color and Extensions

As you can hear a lot is going on, but it is all pretty logical and follows the stuff I already covered. The type of things that I covered in this video, but I am not talking about how you also can add extensions and colors to the chords, turning them into melodies and even chord melody and chord solos. That is what I cover in this video following some solid advice from Joe Pass, so that is the next thing you want to check out.

The Biggest Misunderstanding About Jazz Chords And How To Quickly Fix It

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The 5 Skills That Make You Great At Comping

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The most fun part of playing Jazz is playing with others and in the band shape the music together while you are playing. And when you are comping, that is a huge part of what you are doing, but a lot of the most important things about comping are not taught in lessons online and not in books on chords. So that is what I want to talk about in this video: Things that I learned, mostly from the people I played with or the people that hired me, and I have also found some great stories from some amazing musicians that explain it.

#1 Play The Chords

Even if it is not only about the chords, then you still need to be able to play the chords and get the harmony across, or the last thing you will hear on the gig is “Your Fired”

For any song you play, you need to know the voicings for all the chords

and have a basic understanding of what extensions are available in that song.

But it is incredibly important to remember what the overall goal is: Play the harmony in a way that fits with the music, so in this case the rest of the band.

This is what you need to focus on: build a practical and flexible chord vocabulary instead of learning complicated chords as grips that are sometimes difficult to play and that you can’t do anything with.

You want to try to not get stuck with a static chord, and focus on learning the voicings so that they are things you can improvise with. If you want a vocabulary of chords that helps you turn the symbols into music then this is the way. (b-roll)

It isn’t complicated: If you have a Bb7,

throw away the root. reduce it to the core.

Sit down and learn the other options and think of them as a small scale you can use on top of that chord

#2 Make It Into Music

If you approach chords and songs like this then the next skill gets a lot easier. Check out how Nir Felder Explains it, because he really nails it!

It is very often that I have students telling me how they are practicing chord inversions, but it is very rare that they talk about practicing comping.

And there IS a way to work towards playing music and not just feeding chords to a soloist.

When you practice, you need to play the song and make the music your priority. You are not just a robot interpreting a page in iReal.

So spend some time practicing comping a song and make that feel and sound good. You need to go beyond just playing a II V I or practicing voicings, and instead, also work towards playing entire songs. There you can try to make melodies in your comping that work, take riffs through the progression, and make them into music.

#3 Communicate With The Band

Most comping lessons talk about how you should listen to the soloist, but actually, something else is at least as important if not more important.

Because, when you are comping then you need to get what you play to work together with the rest of the band, and think together with the rhythm section, especially the drummer.

Lewis Nash talks about it in this clip:

When you comp then you shape the music in that conversation with the drummer. I was lucky that I got the chance to play with some drummers that explained this to me early on and it is a bit strange that this is not talked about more also because it really makes playing together so much more fun.

With the rhythm section, you chose to be:

Repetitive:

Play sustained chords:

Busy:

Sparse:

loud, or soft and that is a huge part of how the music sounds. Of course, you are also listening to the soloist and the bass player, but most of this happens when you lock in with the drummer, and I really think that is the backbone of any great rhythm section.

The way to start working on this is really with listening, I especially like the Wynton Kelly trio with Miles

or with Wes

for this, there are many great examples, and in my opinion, most of the good ones are piano, not guitar, which may be a painful truth…

Another tip is also to start checking out how drummers teach comping because I think we could really learn something from that, maybe that could be another video in fact. Let me know in the comments.

#4 Don’t Get in the Way

When I was still just getting started with Jazz then one of the first people that I really liked for the way he could comp was Russel Malone. I heard him playing behind Diana Krall and used a lot of that to figure out how to play behind singers. I also got to hear that trio live with Diana Krall, Ben Wolfe, and Russel Malone and at that concert, Russel took the solos so far out but still managed to bring us back home safely. That concert really blew my mind with harmonic things that sounded great but where I also had no idea what it was.

One of the things that is almost always a problem when you learn to comp is that you overplay. You practice all these things and then when you are in the band you want to use everything at once, and it ends up ruining the whole thing.

Comping is really like a conversation, you don’t open up a conversation by for example listing 25 Amazing and unknown facts about sheep.

This is also about getting that connection with the rest of the band that I already talked about, so it can be good to first focus on locking in with the drummer and the soloist. You can do that by leaving room with longer chords or more sparse comping in the beginning. That will give the freedom to take the music in a direction, and you can try to hear where they want to go.

#5 When To Push/ When To Support

Another aspect of comping is communicating with the soloist and figuring out when to push with more things happening in terms of density, rhythm, or harmony and when to lay back and supply a foundation for the soloist. When I have been playing as a sideman then I was often surprised by how this was very different from soloist to soloist. Some are really looking for ideas and communication and others just want something to play over without any interference. And this is really about trying to feel if the soloist is comfortable or not, it is a bit vague, but you do want to be aware.

As a soloist, I have had experiences playing a gig and when you start going to other places and reharmonizing the song then the piano player will very clearly spell out the original changes as if you are playing something wrong, or you take a solo and after playing one altered dominant then all the maj7 chords are maj#5 and the dominants are 13b9 chords because somebody practiced upper-structure triads that morning.

It is difficult to get this right but it is very important to be aware of, especially if you want to get called for another gig, and again it is something that I mostly picked up talking to people I played with and asking what they think, but you have to look out with that as well because you get great advice but sometimes you get presented with myths about how it works by someone who doesn’t know how it works or just can’t explain it.

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This Is Ruining Your Jazz Solo – A Powerful Bebop Breakthrough

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You have a problem if your Jazz solos sound too much like this:

In a way, this should work because a lot of things are right about this:

It is nailing the changes
There’s a place where you can add a nice Bebop accent
It is actually also a motif that is being moved through the changes.

But it still doesn’t really sound ok, So what IS the problem?

“It is Jazz! It needs chromatic notes!!!”

Still not really working, let me show you why:

A great jazz line should surprise you, it should not only change direction on the heavy beats like this or even the previous one did.

Because that makes it sound heavy, the lines should have more life and more interesting rhythm, not just go from heavy beat to heavy beat like a lawnmower.

Instead, you want something that is more like this:

Of course, It isn’t so that you can never change direction on a heavy beat, but not all the time, and it pays to figure out how to make the line more surprising, so let’s look at some surprisingly easy strategies for that.

Flipping Chromatic Enclosures

A simple chromatic enclosure that you probably already know is a great hack for this!

So if you have a Dm triad

then you can add the enclosure around the notes like this:

These are called diatonic above chromatic below.

The great thing about these is that they have a direction, and can go both up and down:

And that is much more powerful than you think.

Let’s say that you are playing a Descending Dm7 arpeggio:

But you want to add a chromatic enclosure around the last note, the D. The arpeggio is descending, so if you also take a descending enclosure then you get:

But if you have the enclosure go against the descending melody then you get this:

I am sure you can hear how HUGE that difference is!

And this will help you create lines like this:

Throw In A Triad

Another useful tool is to use the diatonic triads like I am using the Am triad on Dm7 in this example:

The concept is pretty simple if you have a note where you can dip down and take a triad that fits the chord, then that will work as a way to skip around and still be a strong melody.

In example 10, I did this on the E adding an Am triad. But you could also just take the A and use the Dm triad:

That will work in a line like this where I also use it on a D diminished triad on the G7(b9):

Steal a Bebop Trick

B-roll: Illustration of the F and E -> add low A?

Often a fantastic solution is to get a large interval skip in there but that sometimes sounds very unnatural. Luckily, we can lean on the Bebop greats to give us some tricks for this!

If you are playing a melody in the scale with a half step apart, so for example F down to E on the Dm7 chord then you can throw in a lower chord tone like the 5th, A:

And this always sounds great, another place where you can use that is on the G7 between the b9 and the root adding a low B:

One of the most powerful places to learn this and also get a ton of inspiration is of course to study the Bebop Greats, and especially Charlie Parker. Check out this video, If you want to see what you can pick up from him and also how I use that in my practice and playing. I can promise you that it is worthwhile and a lot of fun!

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3 Ways To Play More Interesting Rhythms In Your Solos

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Learning to play solos where the rhythm really sounds like Jazz is difficult and it is probably the most important part of Jazz. Jazz Rhythm is a language that you need to develop.

What you want to focus on is practicing things that help you hear phrases that have those rhythms in them. They have to be in your ear and in your system if you want them to come out into your playing.

Content:

0:00 Intro – Jazz Rhythm – Hearing Phrases with great rhythms

0:30 #1 Themes and Melodies

0:45 Internalizing melodies = internalizing rhythms

1:34 Using Theme Rhythms in Solos – Tenor Madness

2:04 The other elusive skill for Jazz Playing

2:18 Rhythmical Target Notes

2:33 The Different Kinds of Target Notes

2:53 Example: 4& as Rhythmical Target on a Turnaround

3:40 #3 Rhythmical Displacement

4:13 Example Motif from Bernie’s Tune

5:20 More than just the notes

5:40 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page

How to Improve your vocabulary of Jazz Rhythms

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We don’t often talk about is how rhythm is actually also a melody, and how to work on your vocabulary for jazz rhythm. But,of course, a very important part of playing jazz is interesting and great rhythms.

In this video, I am going to go over some great examples of rhythms used in a jazz solo taken from Chet Baker, Kenny Burrel, and Jim Hall. I also discuss how you might want to work on improving this part of your own playing.

Content:

0:00 Intro – Adding New Rhythms To Your Solos

0:14 Getting Inspirations from Kenny Burrell Jim Hall and Chet Baker

0:32 Example #1

0:39 Kenny Burrell – Mastering Medium Swing

1:06 How To Use Simple (but great 8th Note Rhythms)

1:24 Example #1 Slow

1:34 How To Use The Material

1:57 Example Lick #1

2:14 Example Lick #2

2:22 Ideas with more of a concept

2:40 Example #2

2:46 Chet Baker – Strong Rhythm and Simple Notes

3:02 Analyzing the line

3:58 Example Lick #3

4:26 Example Lick #4

4:52 Example #3

4:59 Jim Hall – Rhythmical Diversity and Strong Melodies

5:36 Motif and a Scale Sequence

5:59 Example #3 Slow

6:07 Getting More Out of the Pattern and understanding why it is great!

6:30 Example Lick #5

6:40 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page!

Check out more lessons on Jim Hall

Here are a few more Lessons I did on Jim Hall and his fantastic playing that always contains a strong and interesting rhythmical concept as well as beautiful melodies.

Jim Hall – Ingredients Of The Best Solos

Jim Hall on Autumn Leaves – Can it get any better?

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Better Rhythms in Your Guitar Solos

As Jazz guitar players we spend way too much time on worrying about scales, arpeggios and target notes! This means that we forget to worry about playing more interesting rhythms and in Jazz the most important thing is Rhythm and you want to have better rhythms in your guitar solos!

In this lesson I am going to go over a simple exercise where you can limit the amount of notes to create a simple set of a few notes that forces you to play more interesting rhythms! This is an exercise I have done quite often with students and also have done myself with great success! Have a look!

VIDEO

The form and how to find a nice set of notes

The examples that I am playing in the video are all on a Blues in G major. The progression is shown here below:

I have not written out the examples that I play, mainly because I am not trying to get you to play those solos, I am trying to get you to work on your own ability to come up with lines focusing on rhythm!

Finding 3 suitable notes

When choosing notes I start with a simple motif on the G7. Since I want to have something that is easy to both move around on the chords and make melodies with. For this purpose it is probably nice to keep it close and not take for example a complete triad.

For the G7 I am using the notes B D and E. With this notes I can easily make some small simple melodies and as you will see it is easy to “voice-lead” them through the changes and still have note sets that we can improvise with.

To get used to the idea of improvising with the 3 notes you can take the first B,D,E motif and try to play a bit over a static G7 chord just to try to feel how that works.

This motif moved through the entire form is written out in example 1.

Basically we have a 3 note scale for each chord and we can use these 3 notes to improvise with and improvise with more focus on the rhythm that we use.

If you want to check out players who have phrases like this in their solos you should check out some Barney Kessel or some of the early Jim Hall albums.

In the video I play example 1 and also a solo demonstrating how to improvise over the form with first the basic motif and then expanding more on it using more notes.

Rhythmic motifs combined with the 3 notes

One way to expand your vocabulary is to start with a rhythm and find a way to play that with the 3 notes. Then use the G blues and the note sets as a way of practicing this.

In the video I do this with the rhythm shown here below:

A more free approach

You can also be more free and then start with the motif and gradually move away from it and vary it. I do that with the example shown here below in example 3:

It don’t mean a thing..

Rhythm is the overlooked part of playing in 99% of the cases. At the same time you want to have strong and inspired rhythms in your guitar solos! I think this approach is really useful to develop your rhythm. The inspiration for it is Barney Kessel and Jim Hall as I already mentioned, but it also reminds me of more swing oriented phrasing from Lester Young or even big band arrangements.

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Better Rhythms in Your Guitar Solos

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Vlog: Jazz Comping – Jazz Chords and Approaches

Jazz guitar comping is a topic that does not get covered so much. There are a lot of lessons on chord voicings, music theory and extensions, but when it comes to comping it is more difficult to find material. In this video I want to talk about comping by taking the Jazz Standard Just Friends and comp through it in a few different ways and discuss some approaches and philosophies. Since this topic is more about fitting into a situation and reacting to other musicians playing it will be a bit more about approaches and ways of thinking than actual exercises. That said I do go over two ways of coming up with voicings, comping techniques and how to add melodies to your guitar comp.

1:43 Analysis
5:51 Why I don’t use diminished scale
6:58 Scales for a dim chord
9:50 Turnaround to the IV
11:26 Drop2
18:01 Triads
26:42 Comping and Interaction
30:53 Connecting the chords
32:54 Melodies in Comping
35:07 Techniques for melodic comping
39:30 Using Riff comping – focus on groove
45:39 Open Comp: Focus on color and melody
54:56 Conclusion and Outro