Guitar Practice Tips

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. 

Identifying chords by ear is a valuable skill for any musician, especially in jazz. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you develop your ability to identify chords by ear:

Arpeggios are a fundamental aspect of music theory and play a pivotal role in creating expressive melodies, harmonies, and improvisations across various musical genres. In this exploration of basic arpeggios, we will learn how to connect Maj7, 7, min7, m7b5, dim7, min6, and 6 arpeggios (by moving only one note at a time) and how to make the link with basic chord shapes.

This warm-up exercise for beginner guitarists is designed to help you build dexterity, finger strength, and familiarize yourself with the essential intervals within the context of the cycle of fourths.

This guitar lesson with tabs and staves will enlighten you by proposing several options to solo over half-diminished chords aka m7b5.

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.

This guitar lesson focuses on a technique used in many styles of music (blues, jazz, rock, flamenco, pop, bossa nova, etc) called "Fingerstyle" which is to play the strings with the fingers (thumb, index, major and annular) instead of a pick.

This short tutorial provides an effective warm-up exercise for guitar players of all styles and all levels. It comes with a YouTube short video with tab / notation overlayed and a downloadable PDF available for free on the GUMROAD STORE.

Quartal harmony is the way of building chords with intervals of fourths instead of thirds, it's a nice way to modernize and enrich your jazz guitar playing. This post provides an easy exercise for a first approach of quartal playing that is to arpeggiate three-note chords built in fourths, starting on each step of a major scale.

As is the case in many lessons on the website, you'll find a short YouTube video and the link to download the PDF for free, a little further in this article.

This lesson is about a good warm-up exercise for guitarist implying a short pattern (4 beats) made of dominant seventh arpeggios  separated by a tritone (3 whole tones = augmented fourth). This pattern is repeated following a descending chromatic movement.

This warm-up exercise for guitar is to repeat a melodic line following the cycle of fourths. This line is made of two bars containing a major seventh arpeggio (1 - 3 - 5 - 7) and two half-diminished arpeggios (1 - b3 - b5 - b7).

Arpeggios are the backbone of jazz improvisation, they are simple to learn, they allow to easily outline the harmony and create fluid lines. Arpeggios are very popular in all styles of music (rock, metal, blues, pop), that's why it is very important to learn them.

This guitar lesson provides the most important arpeggio shapes that any beginner jazz guitarist must know, classified this way :

major 7, minor 7, dominant 7, half-diminished, diminished 7, Major 7#5 and minMaj7.

You'll find in this tutorial three kinds of guitar diagrams for each arpeggio type :

one-octave shapes (notes within the space of one octave), two-octave shapes (notes within two octaves) and CAGED shapes.

Lesson by Adam Hernandez (jamsville)

In this YouTube video lesson Adam shares the Top 7 habits that can help guitar players progress. Start implementing these advices and you will certainly be on your way to play guitar at a highest level:

The world of jazz guitar books can be a daunting and overwhelming experience for the beginning guitarist. There are literally thousands of books on jazz guitar, many with similar content and information.

Some books are better suited to learning chords, while others are designed to enhance reading skills, still others are meant to teach improvisation concepts. Some books attempt to cover all of these bases. Some of the most useful are collections of transcribed solos and etudes.

Fortunately for you, I have been studying jazz guitar for 15 years and have practiced and taught from many of the best jazz guitar books available on the market.

Whether your focus is developing a strong sense of rhythm, building your improvisational skills, mastering a wide range of chord voicings, progressions, and substitutions, or understanding the theory that ties all of it together, you can use this list of the best jazz guitar books to help guide your path!

Lesson by David Kennedy

This facebook post provides a YouTube video that details how to perform and compose on guitar with any polyrhythm. You will find a link to free resources, including the guitar score and tab in the video description.

Why exploring polyrhythm?

• It can deepen your understanding of rhythm and time signature.
• It’s a very useful tool for generating new rhythm ideas.
• It sounds really cool.

Don't hesitate go watch David's YouTube channel.

Lesson by Pedro Velasco,

Here's number 7 from the Sound Bite series. Next one on Friday.

In this sound bite series I create short chord progressions and melodic motifs over common jazz chord changes. Check the transcription after the video.

For more sound bites and transcriptions,
go to my YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/pedrovpeters
or Soundslice page:
https://www.soundslice.com/users/pedrovelascomusic/

Thanks!

This blog article provides 28 guitar chord shapes to play minor seventh chord on guitar. These positions are built using three different types of voicings as Drop 2, drop 3 and drop 2-4.

This concept highly prized by solo guitar players consists in mixing chords and bass lines. It can be very useful for guitarists who want to accompany a singer or a soloist in a duo situation.

Guitar walking bass lines involve playing one note on each beat in order to make the link between the chords of a progression as a bass player would do. 

They are usually played fingerstyle, basses are played with the thumb whereas the other chord tones are played with the fingers.

This free lesson with tabs and guitar shapes provides some easy examples.

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.

A brand new PDF method is available for download. It rounds out the two previous eBooks Ionian jazz guitar licks and Dorian jazz guitar licks. This book contains 40 dominant jazz guitar lines with tabs, audio files and theory based on the Mixolydian mode for beginners and intermediate players.

Package Details:

• 1 Printable PDF file (high resolution).
• 40 MP3 Audio files related to each lick (high quality).
• 1 Jazz backing track.

You will find here 11 Jazz Blues backing tracks from the YouTube channel Backing Tracks Channel. These jam tracks can be very useful for practicing improvisation and chord comping whether on the guitar or on any other instrument.

Each play along is derived from the basic jazz blues chord progression (the first one of the list). For a better understanding the chords and the Roman numeral analysis are displayed in the video. If you want to learn more about these jazz blues changes check out the related lesson in the blog section.

This infographic printable for free provides diatonic arpeggio and scale shapes for guitar practice. It shows the relationship between arpeggios and modes of the major scale. 

The II-V-I sequence is the most common chord progression played in jazz music and a must know for any guitarist who wants to learn jazz language.

The II, the V and the I (chords and scales) are constructed based on the corresponding second (II), fifth (V)  and first (I) step of the major scale.

In this guitar lesson you will learn what's the 2 5 1 progression and how to play easy jazz lines over a 2-5-1 using the most common scales found in jazz music.

What Scale To Choose For Improvising?

One of the most common question a beginner asks when he wants to start improvising on guitar is : Which scale to choose over which chords? However, there is a lot of scale and a lot of chord, it is easy to get lost. That's why it is important to make the relation between them, trying to understand what is the appropriate scale that fit the chord and vice versa. 

This guitar lesson provides the seventeen most important scales with shapes and formulas to know for improvising over the most used chord types in jazz music (major, minor, dominant and diminished).

Pentatonic scales are scales with five notes per octave. They are frequently used in music all over the world. The word "pentatonic" comes from the Greek word "pente" meaning five and "tonic" meaning tone.

Talk of "the" pentatonic scale generally make reference to the major pentatonic scale and its relative minor. It's a mistake, indeed there are many types of pentatonic scales (Egyptian, Ritusen, Man gong, Altered, Locrian...).

Pentatonic scales are considered earlier than heptatonic scales (seven-note scales) and can be divided into two categories :

• Containing semitones (hemitonic)
• Without semitones (anhemitonic)

The purpose of this post is to propose some tips and ideas for practicing and develop pentatonic scales.

What's Octave Playing?

Octave playing is a big part of jazz guitar language, this technique has been popularized by guitarist Wes Montgomery one of the greatest improvisers and jazz genious of all times.

 Theoretically, the principle is quite easy to understand. You just have to play lines using two simultaneaous notes separated by twelve semitones. In practice, it is more difficult because of the fingerings.

Indeed, you have to move two fingers at the same time while keeping the same hand position. This lesson provides guitar diagrams and easy guitar lines for a good mastery of this technique.

One of the most daunting shifts for any guitarist can be entering the world of jazz guitar. We’ve all read essential jazz guitar books, tutorials and watched videos by those in the know and it’s a vast world full of new theoretical and practical concepts.

Most guitar players get into playing through rock/blues and find jazz later on their ability spectrum. If you understand blues, you can start to make some small changes which will add a jazz dynamic to your playing. In this lesson we will cover some of those small changes you can integrate into your playing today.

Arpeggios are essential musical tools that allow you to build pure and beautiful lines while highlighting the harmony. When playing over chord changes, using arpeggios is the most efficient way to connect these chords together.

This lesson provides four exercises with tabs, standard notation and diagrams that will help improve your guitar skills and your theoretical knowledge.

This guitar lesson is about a very important concept used by many jazz improvisers named "Target notes" or "target tones" or "approach notes". It has to do with targeting chord tones by scale or chromatically.

This technique opens the door to another essential type of targeting called "Enclosures" used to surround a chord tone both diatonically and chromatically from above and below.

Understanding and applying "Targeting" will help you solos sound more jazzy and allow you to expand your harmonic knowledge.

Learning to maneuver through scales on your guitar will bring about a ton of benefits to you, as a player. First of all, you'll begin to perceive music a little bit differently – you'll find logic where you ought to think there was none, you'll understand how your favorite composers got their brilliant ideas, and, most importantly, you'll get to put the theory into practice.

What's more, the whole journey of exploring the theoretical sphere of music concerning the scales isn't all that hard. Essentially, you'll found yourself amidst the crossroads, and you'll have to choose a path – you'll either delve deep into books about music theory, or you'll have to figure everything out yourself.

Regardless of the path you wish to take, mastering and learning guitar scales is, quite frankly, easy. We've brought together a short list of five tips that will make the process even simpler, and more entertaining.

Guest post by Marc-Andre Seguin

So, you've decided to try your hand at Jazz guitar. This article will assume a certain base level of proficiency in the general language of music apart from the specific vernacular that informs jazz music, guitarists specifically. Not because it's a theory article, but because if you hope to learn how to play this music (and any style, really) a little knowledge goes a long way. If you have no background in notated music, theory and harmony please pick up Barbara Wharram's Theory For Beginners. It will open the door.

Generally, when a beginner start to learn to play guitar, he tackles open chords (up the guitar neck), those found in many popular songs.

Then, come the bar chords (major, minor, dominant 7) a little hard to master. But all these chords do not have a very interesting sound and are not mostly used in jazz music.

That's why in this lesson for jazz beginners we will take the main basic guitar bar chords to transform and enrich them so that their sonority is richer, exciting and better suited to jazz concept.

You'll find in this lesson some tips and trick for practicing scales, enrich and develop your playing or simply warming-up before a gig.