Posts by jazz-guitar-licks

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to take familiar minor barre chords and gradually “jazz them up” by modifying or adding notes.

This approach not only improves your chord vocabulary, but also helps you understand how jazz guitarists create smoother, more sophisticated sounds from simple foundations.

The tritone substitution sometimes referred to as dominant chord substitution is one of the most popular harmonic technique found in jazz and other styles of music.

It involves replacing a dominant seventh chord with another dominant seventh chord located a tritone (or augmented fourth) away from the original chord's root.

A new video is online on the youtube channel. It is a quick jazz guitar chord melody arrangement with chord diagrams of the famous jazz standard "Stella by Starlight" (Victor Young). 

This lesson breaks down the m7b5 chord, shows how to play it on guitar, and explains how to use it in common harmonic situations like major and minor II-V-I progressions.

Intervals are the building blocks of melody and harmony—the distances between two pitches.

Understanding intervals helps you recognize and create musical relationships, build chords, and develop more expressive solos.

In this lesson, we’ll explore the full spectrum of intervals, from the smallest step (a minor 2nd) to the expansive leap (an octave and beyond).

By mastering intervals, you’ll improve your ear and your understanding of how music works underneath the surface.

Seventh chords (aka four-note chords) represent the backbone of jazz harmony. It is common to extend them with extra tones.

These other notes form the upper structure of a chord which includes the 9th, 11th and 13th.

Adding extensions to chords help to get off the beaten tracks and provides some new harmonic colors to your playing (chord soloing, comping, and arrangement).

This lesson provides useful extended major 7th chord shapes to apply to your playing.

Chord substitution is to replace a chord by another one to add more harmonic interest to a piece, a song or a chord progression.

In jazz music, this technique is widely used by composers and improvisers.

It can be useful to reharmonize a chord sequence or a jazz standard.

This lesson will help you better understand what is the diatonic chord substitution.

This lesson is about a 12-bar blues in the key of Bb included two guitar transcriptions with tabs : a guitar walking bass line for the accompaniment and a guitar improvisation to solo over.

Note that this study is based on a common blues jazz progression? but with a descending chromatic progression in bars 7 & 8 using three dominant 7th chords (Bb7, A7, Ab7) to approach G7 at the end of the bar 8.

Bb7 | Eb7 | Bb7 | % | 

Eb7 | Edim7 | Bb7 A7 | Ab7 G7 |

C-7 | G7 | Bb7 G7 | C-7 F7 | 

A new printable PDF eBook is available. It's about 11 blues progressions for jazz guitar with tabs, analysis (with roman numerals), explanations and audio files, divided into four chapters :

1- Blues progressions and variations
2- Chord studies
3- Guitar walking-bass studies
4 -Rhythm patterns

Download

Understanding and playing 6th chords—both major and minor—is a powerful way to add richness and color to your guitar playing.

These chords are versatile and frequently used in jazz, blues, rock, and pop music, offering a melodic and harmonic depth that goes beyond standard major and minor chords.

This lesson provides 24 guitar diagrams and voicing charts to play major 6 and minor 6 chords on guitar.

Welcome to this lesson on one of the most iconic and modern-sounding chord voicings in jazz — the "So What" chord. Made famous by pianist Bill Evans on Miles Davis’s legendary tune "So What".

In this lesson, we’ll break down how to play the "So What" chord on the guitar, explore its structure, and learn how to move it around the neck.

Whether you're new to quartal harmony or looking to expand your chord vocabulary, this voicing will open up a fresh, sophisticated palette for your playing.

"There Will Never Be Another You" is a popular song by Harry Warren (music) and Mack Gordon (lyrics).

It is one of the most known jazz standards and an indispensable study for any jazz guitarist.

This jazz guitar lesson provides you different chord voicings (drop 2, inverted, rootless and extended chords) on the top four strings of the guitar to comp over this jazz tune.

To enrich and modernize the harmonization of a piece it is common to use fourth chords.

They can replace some original chords to bring more melodic freedom into improvisation and more tension in harmony.

Since the late 1950s, harmony in fourths has played a very important role in the development of modern jazz.

Musicians and composers have used a lot quartal harmony.

Among them, the great American pianist McCoy Tyner, who, is a master in the art of playing quartal chords. Mike Stern, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Bill Evans and Kurt Rosewinkel have also used this technique. 

In this lesson with tabs and shapes, we will see how to build chords in fourths, how to harmonize the major scale with and how to use them in comping. 

The major 2 5 1 sequence is the most common chord progression used in jazz music but also in a whole number of styles of music as pop, rock, blues, country.

It is present in many jazz standards (Summertime, Autumn leaves, Blue bossa, All the things you are and many more), this is why it is very important to master it.

Scale harmonization is the process of creating chords from each note of a given musical scale. This is one of the fundamental theoretical elements to understand music.

This lesson explains how to create triads and seventh chords from each note of the major scale.

Guide tones are the notes in a chord which leads or gives harmonic pull toward the next chord, these are an excellent way to study and absorb the sound of any chord progression. 

Guide tones are used to outline chord progressions in an improvisation.

They are most of the time the 3rd and the 7th because this is what determines whether a chord is major, minor, or dominant. 

This jazz guitar lesson explains how to solo over common jazz chord progressions by using guide tones.