The 5 Best Exercises When Learning Jazz Guitar
Figuring out what to practice when you’re learning jazz guitar is overwhelming. There are thousands of exercises to work on — and the hardest part isn’t playing or practicing… it’s knowing what to actually focus on.
I’ve been teaching jazz guitar for almost 20 years, and these are the 5 exercises I always come back to — because they build the core skills you need, without over-complicating things.
Let’s start with some foundational ideas and techniques — and then build exercises on top of them so you can actually use what you learn.
Enough with the endless scales!
The worst hurdle for beginners in jazz is scales — especially this bit of advice, which I got too when I was starting out: ‘Learn all the scales, in all positions, and in all keys.’ At that point you don’t even know what that means, and I spent hours grinding scales and wondering why my solos still sounded like scales. Instead, do the opposite of that: 1 scale, 1 position, 1 key.
And from there, work your way up to the most important scale exercise in jazz.
Exercise #1 – Melodic Harmony
The goal is to learn to play jazz songs. And the basic harmony in jazz standards? It’s mostly 7th chords
and those arpeggios are a core part of all the great jazz solos.
Let me first explain what the diatonic arpeggios are, and then give you a way to learn them that is 100x easier than just trying to play them. Here’s a C major scale. For each note in a scale, you can build a 7th chord. First, you get a row of 3rd intervals, then you get the diatonic triads, and finally you get the diatonic 7th chords.
And that recipe is also how you should practice them, start with C major in a single position, and the exercises you get along the way all help your playing — not just with arpeggios, but with phrasing, technique, and understanding harmony.
Start with the scale
Then learn the 3rd intervals:
Add another 3rd so that you can play the diatonic triads
And finally, you have the 7th chord arpeggios
Later in the video, I’ll also talk about improvising with these arpeggios. Like this, you have a process to build things up that you can use for any positions or scale, like harmonic and melodic minor. And the more times you do it the easier the next one will be.
When it comes to chords, you don’t want to approach things in a position, here’s a better approach:
Exercise #2 – Harmony That Works
Arpeggios help you solo over chords, but you also need to know how to play the chords.
And again, you don’t want to jump straight to giant chord diagrams that are hard to play and internalize.
Start simple — with shell voicings, and an exercise that is also great for more complicated chords.
There is no stronger foundation than Shell-voicings. There are two variations with the root either on the 5th or 6th string, and the 3rd and 7th on the middle strings, which is really all you need to outline the harmony.
And again, it is useful to play them through a scale to explore the diatonic chords, but here it is more useful to practice them by moving along the neck, like this:
And, of course, also the other string set.
And besides working on the diatonic chords, it’s also really useful to put them to use in a tune like Just Squeeze Me. Notice how the shell voicings naturally split into bass note and chord — that makes it a lot easier to create interesting rhythms:
Scales and chords are great, but what really makes jazz come alive is learning how to turn them into music — how to improvise. Let’s explore how to get started soloing.
Exercise #3 – Use The Good Notes
Here’s the problem for beginning improvisers: you see the chords, you know the scales — but it’s SO MUCH information, and you have NO IDEA what to play or how to make it sound good.
One of the best ways to get through that is a limitation exercise. I use this with my students all the time, and it’s great for a LOT of things. Looking back, it’s a pity none of my teachers gave it to me when I was starting out.
Chord tone soloing is also a big part of the foundation that you learn to build in my Jazz beginner course: The Jazz Guitar Roadmap
Limitation exercises work by reducing your options, so you can focus on developing something else, like phrasing or melody. In this case, I want you to start improvising only using the basic chord tones.
For a turnaround in C major a very simple version could be this:
First spend some time improvising just using these notes:
Practicing like this is often called Chord Tone Soloing, and ahere is a main goal here, but one of the best side-effects of chord tone soloing is that it forces you to focus on melody, rhythm, and phrasing — and that’s how your playing really grows, but for beginners the goal is to learn to see and use chord tones in their solos, especially when learning songs.
You can take this up a level by including all the chord tones in this position as well, But don’t rush into that just yet — start simple and build from there:
Even though playing songs and improvising is a huge part of learning Jazz, there is another way you can improve pretty much any aspect of your soloing.
Exercise #4 – Practice Improvisation (Very) Slowly
One of the hardest parts of learning jazz is improvising a solo. You have to keep track of where you are, what notes you can play — and still make it sound good. Everyone says, “Practice slowly.” But when it comes to improvising…, how does that work?
The answer is composing lines. Composing is the best way to practice slowly, and it is where you can go back and change lines until you can put something together that sounds good.
Let’s say you want to learn how to use an Em7 arpeggio over a Cmaj7 chord.
This is what Barry Harris refers to as using the arpeggio from the 3rd and it is a very common device in Jazz solos. Another bonus is that if you have practiced diatonic arpeggios in C major, then you already know how to play it.
Of course, the arpeggio itself sounds just fine:
But to really use it, you want to connect it to other ideas, like a chromatic phrase:
Or lead into it with an enclosure:
Writing lines like this helps you hear how the arpeggio fits the chord — and how to turn it into music. And this is exactly what Barry Harris was doing in his masterclasses: composing to teach bebop phrasing and solo vocabulary. You will never waste your time composing lines to learn some new tricks. But even if you can play lines with the arpeggios and other things, you still need to be able to tie it all together; that is what the next exercise is about!
Exercise #5 – Be More Melodic
The one thing most people mention when talking about great solos is that “it tells a story.” But when you’re just starting out with jazz improvisation, you’re too busy just keeping up — trying to follow the chords and find something that fits. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for storytelling, but here’s how you change that.
This advice might make me sound like a self-help guru, but what you need to learn is to listen to yourself. I guess it’s better if I explain that.
What makes your solo both more melodic and more like a story is that the phrases fit together. Let’s explore how you practice that.
To start, practice rubato. Let’s take the turnaround in C major from earlier and start really simple:
Play a short phrase on Cmaj7:
Now listen and see if you can come up with what might fit. You could try to see if you could play something similar but for A7
And don’t worry, if it takes a few tries for you to find the right phrase, you are trying to listen and play what you hear. Maybe move it to the Dm7 chord as well
But after 3 times, it might be nice to play something else on G7, and again, take your time and don’t be afraid to try several things:
I am using two techniques here: motivic development, where I stick to the same motif on Cmaj7, A7, and Dm7, and then call-response to come up with something that feels like an answer on the G7.
This is always good to experiment with, and you should also explore how to do this in your own time. A great way to work on it is to turn it into a limitation exercise and only use a few notes on each chord. here I am using 3 notes per chord, which also helps you be more creative with the rhythm:
Copy Joe Pass’ Chord Strategy
Developing your ability to play phrases and connecting those phrases is where it becomes music, and you don’t only need that for solos; you also need it with chords. One way to make that easier is to approach chords the way Joe Pass does, and that is what I cover in this video. This is important because you can’t thinkof phrases if you have to worry about 100s of chord voicings. Check it out!
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