Learning jazz guitar can feel like drowning in options — 1000 of things to practice and no idea what actually matters.
You always feel like you should do more, but you’re stuck on exercises, and your playing isn’t improving.
So in this video, I’ll give you 7 levels — the exercises that actually move your playing forward, in the order you need them, so it’s easy to build your skills step by step.
You already know it’s impossible to practice everything. Learning jazz is like crossing a stream on stepping stones — miss one, and you don’t get to the other side; in fact, you’re in the water
So here’s the breakdown: 7 levels, in order.
Level 1 – Avoid The Scale Madness
Most guitarists learning jazz look at endless lists of scales that they need to learn. That is NOT how it works. Instead, keep it simple and focus on the most important scale for jazz.
You might think the pentatonic scale is a good place to start — it’s the one you already know. But the sound you associate with jazz doesn’t come from the pentatonic scale.
That sounds like this:
Compare that to a bebop-inspired line — you can hear exactly what’s missing.
So what gets you to that sound? The major scale.
In the end, you can play jazz with just three scales — major, harmonic minor, and melodic minor. But the major scale is the one you need first. It’s what most jazz is built on, and it’s what makes everything else in these 7 levels make sense later.
Level 2 – The Chords in the Scale
Before you dig into the arpeggios you need, one thing: don’t try to learn this scale in all 12 keys and every position right away. That’s how people burn out before they ever get to use it. You need to have time to practice playing as well, not just scales. Instead, focus on really learning the scale first — know what’s actually in there.
If you look at any jazz song, the basic chord type is the 7th chord. To connect the major scale to the chords, you build the 7th chord arpeggios in the scale. What we call the diatonic 7th chord arpeggios.
This is the single most useful scale exercise in jazz. Because it connects the chords in the songs to the scale you use for soloing.
Similar to the scales: you don’t need every arpeggio as a separate position across the neck.
Most jazz licks only use one-octave arpeggios, and you never play an arpeggio alone — it’s mixed in with other notes from the scale.
Luckily, you can ease into the diatonic arpeggios with a simple set of stepwise exercises.
Start with the scale itself.
Then the interval the arpeggios are built from — the diatonic thirds.
Stack two thirds and you get a triad — another shape you need in your ears and fingers.
Add one more third, and you have the diatonic seventh chords — full arpeggios for every chord in the scale.
This exercise helps you with several important things: you get arpeggios for every chord in a song, so you really nail the changes.
And just as powerful — you can use several different arpeggios over the same chord, which gives you way more options for great lines.
Check out how much you can do with that in this example:
Once you can play the diatonic arpeggios as an exercise, go through a song and play the arpeggio for each chord.
That will set you up for using them when you start soloing. You also want to build vocabulary — both by making your own licks with arpeggios, and, of course, by checking out how other players use them, something I’ll come back to later.
If you want to work through these exercises, you don’t need to memorize them off the video. I made a free PDF with all of them so you can practice at your own pace. There’s a link in the description.
But you’re not only going to be soloing — you also need a foundation for jazz chords. Let’s look at that next, and I’ll explain why starting with the wrong chords can actually hold you back.
Level 3 – The Right Chords To Begin With
Let me first explain why starting with chords can actually hold you back: the most important parts of any style is rhythm, phrasing, and how melodies flow. That’s almost impossible to learn if you’re only playing full chords with 4 or 5 notes all the time — and 100x easier if you’re playing single notes.
Some of you will disagree with that — tell me why in the comments.
That doesn’t mean you skip chords completely — it means when you do get to them, you want the simplest and most flexible foundation, not something that eats all your practice time.
Jazz beginners waste a lot of time learning 100s of difficult voicings and lots of inversions without being able to play songs or do anything with all that material.
Instead of starting with complicated shapess, it’s 1000 times better to start with something simple that you can actually use to play songs and hear the harmony.
The chords you want to start with are shell voicings — easy, complete, and flexible three-note voicings for 7th chords.
A 7th chord normally has 4 notes, as you saw with the diatonic arpeggios. Shell voicings just leave out the 5th.
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There are two shapes: one with the root on the 6th string, and the 7th and the 3rd above it.
And one with the root on the 5th string, and with the 3rd and 7th above that.
Notice how the chord tones are always on the middle strings, and the root is always on the lower string set — which turns out to be really useful.
You want to learn these as diatonic chords as well, through the chords of a scale, not just as isolated shapes. That will help you learn the chords that appear together in songs as a group.
For C major, here’s the full set with the root on the 5th string.
Same thing, but with the root on the 6th string. Here I am starting on the 4th note in the scale, Fmaj7, but I am still playing the diatonic chords of C major.
But playing these chords is one thing — they are useless if you can’t use them to play songs. Let me show you how that works..
Level 4 – Chords Are For Making Music
Once you have both sets of shell voicings, start connecting them in progressions. To begin with, short, common progressions like a II-V-I in C major work well.
You get two options for a II-V-I in C major using the chords from the previous level. All I’m doing is starting on the II chord, Dm7, and staying close to that. Start with Dm7 on a 5th-string root.
You can also start with Dm7 with the root on the 6th string.
But you quickly want to move from progressions like this into playing actual songs.
Use what you figured out with diatonic chords and II-V-I’s, and go through songs to find where the chords are. Then start playing them.
An easy example is Satin Doll.
The song is in C major, but you get a lot of other II V’s as well.
II V in C, I am using the one starting with the root on the 5th string, then a II V in D. Here I just move up everything two frets.
For Am7 D7, I use the one starting with the root on the 6th string, and I can use those two for Abm7 Db7 as well, before resolving to Cmaj7 with the root on the 5th string.
Like this, everything stays close, is easy to play and the harmony flows. Notice how I make sure to group chords together whenever I can. That makes it a lot easier to remember and play songs.
You can use these chords to comp through the song like this:
Later, you can start to expand on these chords by adding notes and melody, turning them into rootless voicings. I have another video that goes over that process — leave a comment if you want the link.
If you like diving into jazz guitar like this — actually playing solos and making the harmony flow — subscribe to the channel. I publish videos like this every week.
Now you have arpeggios and chords. But just playing the right notes doesn’t make it a real jazz solo. Your lines need to flow in the right way.
Level 5 -The Jazz Flow
If you start learning jazz, you’ll quickly hear someone tell you that Bebop sounds like Bach — and there’s a reason for that.
When you listen to a jazz solo, like the Charlie Parker solo I showed earlier, you can see how the lines really move toward strong chord tones on the downbeat.
That gives 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.
And that type of flow is something you also find in the fairly dense melodies of Bach, which is why those two are connected so often.
But if you’re just starting out and learning how to play the right notes over each chord, you’re probably not thinking about how the solo flows — you’re more focused on finding and playing the right notes on each chord. That means a solo on a blues in F sounds something like this:
I’m making it worse than it actually is, but I’m sure you get the idea. What’s missing is that you start using the notes of the chord you’re 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. Your solo should sound more like this:
I’ll show you a simple method to get this into your solos, but next to that, 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’s a great way to hear this in action.
If you want my help getting started on playing songs and solos that actually sound like jazz, with that flow from chord to chord, join 8000 other students in my Jazz Guitar Roadmap course. It’s a step-by-step method for getting started with jazz, so you don’t have to piece it together yourself from random online lessons. There’s a link in the description if you want to check it out.
Let me show you how to practice toward a real jazz flow.
Level 6 – Make Your Solo Flow
This isn’t magic — it’s something you can actually learn. Take the notes of the chord you’re on, and use them to build a melody that points toward a note in the next chord. That’s what we call a target note.
This makes your solo actually flow: the melody lines up with the chords, so it’s not random notes over chords — they’re going somewhere.
And because the chord tones land on the strong beats, the harmony stays clear. You can hear the chords change even without any backing.
Here’s a simple way to start. If you’re improvising over an F blues, take the arpeggios of F7 and Bb7.
The easiest note to make a chord’s sound clear is the third. So for Bb7, that’s D — use it as your target note. Now build melodies with the F7 arpeggio that resolve onto that D.
When you play it like this, there’s a real connection between the two chords — it doesn’t sound like separate notes over separate chords, it sounds like one melody, and you can clearly hear the chord change.
From here, explore different ways to build lines like this, even with just the four chord tones of each chord.
Remember that you can get a free PDF of all the examples and exercises so that you can easily make this a part of your own playing. The link is in the description.
This gets your lines flowing — but there’s more to jazz phrasing than one-octave arpeggios alone.
Level 7 – Jazz Phrasing
These 6 levels give you a real foundation: a scale you can actually use, arpeggios connected to real chords, chords you can play through a song, and lines that actually flow from chord to chord.
But there’s more to how jazz lines really get their sound — ways to play arpeggios, chromatic passing notes, chromatic enclosures, trills. These are the details that turn correct notes into something that actually sounds like jazz.
I cover all of that in this video — something I wish every beginner would watch, so they start sounding more like jazz. Check it out.
Learn jazz, make music.
I Wish Every Jazz Beginner Could Watch This!
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