Jazz Guitar Lessons

Here are two easy jazz guitar licks published on JGL's Facebook, Youtube and Instagram pages, based on a 2 5 1 sequence in F major (Gm7 | C7 | Fmaj7) implying two arpeggios and a minor triad.

This lesson is the third part of the serie "Jazz Guitar Lines Over Common Chord Changes" that provides easy jazz guitar licks for beginners to play over II V, II V I and I IV II V progressions. These lines are majoritarily built with the major blues scale, the Mixolydian mode and a whole-tone scale motif.

In this guitar lesson with shapes, tab, video and analysis you will learn how to use seventh arpeggios over important jazz chord sequences as minor & major II V , major II V I and I vi ii V progressions.

You'll find the link to the PDF at the bottom of the page.

This short jazz guitar study with tab, score and chord charts provides some easy jazz lines to apply over three common chord progressions found in jazz. These licks will help you better understand what scales and modes can be used over basic chord changes. You'll find a link to the free PDF at the end of this lesson.

Altered chords add color, tension, and sophistication to your playing, making them a must-know for jazz, fusion, and even blues and rock guitarists.

An altered chord contains one (or several) altered notes that don't belong to the diatonic scale.

These notes are the b5 (flat fifth), #5 (sharp fifth), b9 (flat ninth), #9 (sharp ninth).

In this guitar lesson we will see that they can be grouped into three disctinct families (major, minor and dominant) and also how to play them on guitar.

This guitar lesson discusses a very useful way to come out new colors to your soloing or comping ideas called "Upper-structure Triads".

This technique consists of superimposing triads to highlight extended notes of minor, major and dominant chords.

This lesson provides a chord melody arrangement for guitar of the famous song "Days of Wine and Roses" written by Henry Mancini (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics) for the movie film of the same name. 

Unlocking that smooth tension and release in jazz harmony is where the magic lies—and the dominant seventh flat-fifth (7♭5) chord is one of your secret weapons.

Imagine sliding into a chord that sounds both unexpected and inevitable, bridging the gap between yellow-and-gold major chords and grey-shaded minor ones. That’s what the 7♭5 chord does.

Here is 12-bar jazz-blues study in Bb with guitar tab and standard notation mixing basic jazz chords and minor blues scale fragments. You'll find it for free (or Pay What You Want) on jazz-guitar-licks Gumroad store.

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).

This cheat sheet show how the modes of the major scale are built and what is the relation between them.

This lesson provides a chord study with tab of the Latin jazz tune Armando's rumba by Chick Corea based on the Latin Real Book version in C minor.

Here below you'll find guitar tabs corresponding to the four main parts of the tune (A-B-C-D).

The chords used in this arrangement are mostly seventh chords as min7, maj7, dim7 and dom7 (drop 2, drop 3 and rootless voicings) including basic triads (min, aug) and altered dominant chords (7#9, 7b13).

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.

A brand new video is now available on JGL's YouTube channel. It's about 10 Pat Martino lines taken from the jazz blues tune "Cisco". You can watch / hear the video below and maybe check out the full tutorial in the "solo transcriptions" section of this website. 

Suspended chords are chords derived from triads and tetrads, the third is replaced with a fourth (most of the time) or a second, making them chords that are neither major nor minor.

This lesson with charts, tabs, and diagrams, teaches how these chords are constructed and how to play them on the guitar.

Satin Doll by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, witten in 1953, is one of the most famous jazz tune. It has been recorded by many jazz musicians as Wes Montgomery, Ella Fitzgerald, Mc Coy Tyner, Oscar Peterson and of course Duke Ellington himself. It has become a classic jazz standard, a must-hear, very popular at jam sessions.

This guitar lesson with chord shapes and scale charts explains how to play easy jazz chords and what basic scales to choose for improvising over Satin Doll.