Jazz Guitar Lessons

After You've Gone is a pop song composed in 1918 by Turner Layton. This blog post provides an easy walking bass lines and chords arrangement with tabs for guitar.

Shell voicings are better known as 3-note chords (or guide tone chords).

They are made up of the most essential notes (root, third and seventh) that define a chord (the fifth is omitted).

They can very useful for beginner guitarists who want to explore basic guitar comping rhythms. 

This lesson provides the essential chord shapes and exercises for practicing them on guitar.

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.

A new video is available on the YouTube channel. This is a chord melody arrangement with synced shapes for jazz guitar of the standard All of Me by Simons & Marks.

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)

Learning jazz guitar chords is a real challenge for beginners.

In this lesson, you will understand how they are built and how to play them on guitar.

A new video has been published on the YouTube channel. It contains 10 exercises with chord shapes and numeral analysis about different types of variations of the jazz blues progression for jazz guitar rhythm. 

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.

This lesson explains how jazz guitar chords are built and how to play them using common positions.

This will help you understand, identify, build and play one of the most important types of chords.

All the shapes proposed in this tutorial are movable and playable anywhere on the fretboard.

The minor II-V-I sequence is equivalent to the major II-V-I sequence, but played in minor harmonic key.

This is a must know for any guitarist who wants to learn to solo over tunes in minor keys.

This guitar lesson for beginners explains what is the minor 2 5 1 progression, what scales and what chords can be used for improvising over it.

Whether simple or compound intervals are a very important part of  music theory.

Knowing them allow understand how scales, arpeggios and chords are built.

Intervals are useful tools to visualize the notes and understand their relationships on the guitar fretboard.

This lesson with downloadable pdf, guitar shapes and theory will help you better figure them out and play them on guitar.

This lesson explains how to build drop 2 and drop 3 seventh chords from the harmonic minor scale.

This action which consists in stacking notes in interval of thirds starting on each tone of a scale is commonly called "harmonization".

This lesson provides an easy chord melody arrangement for guitar with tablature, standard notation and chord shapes of the bossa nova latin jazz tune "Wave" by Antonio Carlos Jobim.

wave-a.c-jobim-guitar-transcription.pdf (92 Ko)

A new lesson (with YouTube video, analysis and tabs) intended for all jazz, blues, groove enthusiasts and John Scofield fans is now available for free on the website. It contains 10 John Scofield jazz guitar licks transcribed from one of his solo in the tune "Little Walter Rides Again" live at live at Estival Jazz Lugano 2007 with MMW trio (John Medeski, Billy Martin and Chris Wood). They show how Sco used to mix pentatonic scales, blue notes and altered tones.

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.