Chords

This lesson provides 15 basic jazz guitar chords that every beginning jazz guitar player should know.

These chords are grouped into five families : 

• Major seventh chords (Maj7)
• Minor seventh (m7)
• Dominant 7th (7)
• Half diminished / minor seventh flat fifth (m7b5)
• Diminished 7th (dim7)

Learning jazz guitar chords is a real challenge for beginners.

In this lesson, you will understand how they are built and how to play them on guitar.

A new video has been published on the YouTube channel. It contains 10 exercises with chord shapes and numeral analysis about different types of variations of the jazz blues progression for jazz guitar rhythm. 

The triad pair system is a technique used by many jazz improviser to build modern improvised lines.

It consists of playing two adjacent triads from a scale.

The most used are from the major diatonic system, however it is possible to use triad pairs from other scales as melodic minor, harmonic minor and harmonic major.

This guitar lesson with tabs, shapes and theory is focused on triad pairs from the major scale only.

This lesson explains how jazz guitar chords are built and how to play them using common positions.

This will help you understand, identify, build and play one of the most important types of chords.

All the shapes proposed in this tutorial are movable and playable anywhere on the fretboard.

The minor II-V-I sequence is equivalent to the major II-V-I sequence, but played in minor harmonic key.

This is a must know for any guitarist who wants to learn to solo over tunes in minor keys.

This guitar lesson for beginners explains what is the minor 2 5 1 progression, what scales and what chords can be used for improvising over it.

Whether simple or compound intervals are a very important part of  music theory.

Knowing them allow understand how scales, arpeggios and chords are built.

Intervals are useful tools to visualize the notes and understand their relationships on the guitar fretboard.

This lesson with downloadable pdf, guitar shapes and theory will help you better figure them out and play them on guitar.

This lesson explains how to build drop 2 and drop 3 seventh chords from the harmonic minor scale.

This action which consists in stacking notes in interval of thirds starting on each tone of a scale is commonly called "harmonization".

This chart show the main shapes for playing diminished triads on guitar. Get more triad positions in the related PDF "126 Triad Chord Shapes".

Blues progressions are fairly present in jazz, there are many variations on the basic structure.

In this lesson you will learn to incorporate major, minor II V I sequences and turnarounds in order to make them evolve.

In music, a dyad refers to a two-note chord or interval. Unlike traditional chords, which consist of three or more notes played simultaneously, dyads are comprised of only two notes. This guitar lesson explores the concept of diatonic dyads.

There are mutliple ways of taking an intro or ending a jazz tune.

You can start from the V of the key, simply play the last 4 or 8 bars of the tune, try to incorporate a turnaroud and its several variations, the list is long....

You''ll find in this lesson 10 jazz guitar progressions with tabs, standard notation and audio files that work both as intros and endings for any jazz standards in C major.

Altough all these exercises are in the key of C major, it is possible and very important to transpose them in any key. 

Dominant 7 chords are one of the most important chords to know, they can be found in many styles of music as blues, funk, pop and of course in jazz music. In this lesson we will see how dominant 7 chords are built and how to play them on guitar using 36 different voicing shapes.