jazz 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)

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.

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). 

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.

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

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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.

Quartal harmony is a modern jazz harmony technique based on stacking notes in fourths instead of the traditional thirds. On guitar, quartal chords create open, ambiguous and sophisticated voicings that are especially useful for jazz comping, modal jazz and chordal improvisation.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to build quartal chords, play chords in fourths across the guitar neck, harmonize the major scale with quartal voicings, use inversions and four-note shapes, and apply the famous "So What" chord to jazz guitar comping.

Quartal harmony became an important part of modern jazz during the second half of the 20th century, with players such as McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Bill Evans and Mike Stern exploring the sound in different ways.

The examples below include guitar diagrams, chord shapes and practical applications so you can take these fourth-based voicings directly into your jazz guitar playing.