Best Guitar Playing Habits

Learning jazz guitar requires a systematic and disciplined practice routine.

Here's a comprehensive practice plan bringing together 10 essential points to help you develop your jazz guitar skills. 

Guest Post By Jack Handyside at pickupmusic.com

Jazz standards are some of the most beautiful and interesting pieces of music ever written, but learning these complex songs and committing them to memory can feel overwhelming if you don’t know where to start.

Luckily for you, we’re here to help! This article will introduce you to a tried and true, eight-step method that you can use to learn any jazz standard. Our focus today will be on the classic jazz standard Autumn Leaves written by Joseph Kosma.

Harmonizing the minor pentatonic scale involves creating chords that complement the scale and enhance its melodic possibilities. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to harmonize the minor pentatonic scale on guitar:

This guitar lesson propose 13 exercices implying the five main types of arpeggios (major 7, dominant 7, minor 7, half-diminished and diminished 7) to both preparing your hands, learning your fretboard and hearing the color of each arpeggio.

Free PDF Available Here On GUMROAD.

Lesson By Diego Wasserman

In this video Diego show you 20 jazz guitar lines from Django's recordings played over minor and major 2 5 1 (II-V-I) progressions. He plays them at different tempos and provides a brief analysis showing the scales, motifs and arpeggios used. Two different positions for each lick are also proposed on the fretboard. The idea is to understand how Django Reinhardt approach the famous II V I progression.

Lesson By Thomas Berglund

This video lesson is an easy chord/melody guitar arrangement of Blue Bossa, a very popular instrumental latin jazz tune composed by Kenny Dorham. The video includes a lesson where Thomas shows and discusses the arrangement and also provides tips to make your own arrangements.

Lesson by George Nazos

In this short video lesson with tab, George proposes a guitar lick/exercise in rhythm and picking.  He shows how to use different subdivisions in arpeggios following a 2 5 1 6 chord progression while using substitution for the dominant arpeggios from the altered scale. 

Lesson By Steve Down

This video is the last installment of the lesson series on the funky Kenny Burrell version of "My Favorite Things" from his 1966 album "Soulero". In this last lesson (please consider watching the 7 previous) we finish off by looking at the final head, the outro solo and I give you my top 5 take aways from the series complete with some extra example licks!

Have fun practicing!