As you know, It is a lot of fun to play Jazz chords and check out beautiful progressions, and the best place to put those chords to work is in intros for a songs! I am going to show you 7 common intro types with variations, but I will also show you some concepts that help you take them further and make them your own! And, I’ll add some stories about how intros and beautiful harmony can get you in a lot of trouble with the singer! Let’s get nerdy with some harmony! #1 Turnaround – It’s better than you think The first one is the trusted old I VI II V, I am going to start by not using the VI fro ..read more

Imagine if there were 5 short licks that you can already play that would make your solos sound 10x better! If you are trying to sound more like Jazz when you solo then you have probably run into this problem: You can play an arpeggio: and you can play a scale: and you can put it together to a lick that fits the chords but… It doesn’t sound right, even though the notes are all “perfect” and “correct”, Now what? Let me show you! #1 Make Your Arpeggios Swing! This is about rhythm even with examples like this that are all 8th notes. And you need the right melody to get the right rhythm. It al ..read more

The “Random Phrases” Solo A big part of why a solo sounds great is the flow. (example 1) But it can be difficult to get that right and very often you feel like you are trying the best you can but there is no flow at all and nothing fits together The real problem is how you think about your soloing. To fix it, you need to go pretty far back, but once you do, you will not only become much better at making solos sound more natural over the chords, but you will also start to hear the chords better and hear how your favorite Jazz artists also think and hear phrases in the same way, I’ll show you ..read more

I am incredibly lucky that I get to jam with great musicians, and one of the reasons for that is something that Jazz beginners miss: You need to be able to lay down great-sounding chords that feel comfortable to play over. If you can’t play chords and comp then nobody wants to play with you. Let me show you 3 rules that your comping needs to follow, and don’t worry none of them are about difficult complicated chords and with the 3 rules, you can start to play beautiful and swinging comp, and even though I am starting with really simple chords, you can go as far as you want with this, check it ..read more

Music Theory can seem very scary for a Jazz beginner, and you will come across people insisting it is bad for your creativity, but in reality, it is a great help when it comes to learning Jazz, and it helps speed up the learning process. Imagine a guitarist who doesn’t know theory. He’s stuck, and can’t turn the licks he learns into new vocabulary, he doesn’t have a way to learn and organize the notes on the fretboard and he can’t use the songs he knows to learn more songs easily, Learning Jazz becomes very difficult like that. So there are a LOT of advantages to learning just a bit of basi ..read more

As a Jazz guitarist and teacher then let me help you avoid a few things that a LOT of Jazz beginners get wrong and waste a lot of time on! You might be making one of them right now, and there are certainly a few mistakes I have made myself as well, but I’ll tell you about it along the way. #1 Music Theory Is Not Music I know that Jazz is complicated, and it can be fun to learn music theory and read about all the different options and things to study that you have available in books or online lessons, but that is a very superficial way to learn things. With theory, you should aim to learn the ..read more

The Most Difficult Skill To Learn You want to sound like Jazz. That’s the goal! You want to be able to take a song, solo over it, and play stuff that sounds right, with good phrasing and good timing. And That, is the most difficult thing about learning Jazz is not the technical things like scales and arpeggios, hitting the changes. One of the best places to get started with this is to start learning solos by ear, and I think you should start with Grant Green solos. You might wonder why Grant Green That is because His solos will teach you: Amazing Bebop Phrasing and Vocabulary on the guitar ..read more

Are you just playing notes or are you playing a solo and making music? Often when solos are on one chord then it becomes painfully clear when a guitarist doesn’t know how to make that sound like music, but let me show you some ways to fix that. Mistake #1 – Not Listening To The Most Important Guitarist Let’s start with the worst mistake! Those solos where it is just a bunch of notes strung together, and even if the notes aren’t wrong then this still doesn’t make any sense. It sounds like nervously talking all the time but not saying anything.  (B-roll nervous talking, George or Woody All ..read more

There are two types of guitar players, which one are you: Do you like to practice exercises, and develop your technique or do you hate scales and think that the devil invented the metronome? When it comes to developing your technique then I don’t think there is a correct or best way to go about it, and maybe you never need to practice scales or exercises at all., but what is anyway important is that you figure out what works the best for you! And I think You want to regularly go over what you spend your practice time on and figure out if you should change something. My Philosophy For any exer ..read more

The Roadblock This is such a common roadblock when you are just getting started with Jazz: You are practicing scales and arpeggios, but getting that to sound right in a solo is very difficult, and the only help you can find is adding more complicated and weird things which doesn’t really solve the problem and just gives you more scales and arpeggios to practice. Avoid Scale Solos Most of the time, The problem is that your solos sound too much like you are just running up and down scales, which is maybe “correct” but also pretty boring and predictable B-roll: list over “I will show you some s ..read more