Jazz Guitar Lessons

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. 

A new printable PDF method is available for download. It contains 40 Dorian jazz guitar patterns with tab, standard notation, audio files, theory and numeral analysis. The licks are suitable for beginners, they are built from the Dorian mode and designed to be played over minor chords. Many theoretical concepts are discussed (arpeggios, diatonic substitution, triad pairs, passing tones, etc)

Package Details

• 1 Printable PDF file (High resolution).
• 40 Mp3 audio files (High quality).
• 1 Jazz Backing Track.

Follow this link for more info.

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.

A new video is available on the YouTube channel. It contains 10 easy Miles Davis lines with analysis, audio files, standard notation and tabs overlayed transcribed from Solar, Vierd Blues and Tune Up.

You can also check out the free full course about those 10 Miles Davis licks for guitar.

Blues progressions are fairly present in jazz, there are many variations on the basic structure.

In this lesson you will learn to incorporate major, minor II V I sequences and turnarounds in order to make them evolve.

In music, a dyad refers to a two-note chord or interval. Unlike traditional chords, which consist of three or more notes played simultaneously, dyads are comprised of only two notes. This guitar lesson explores the concept of diatonic dyads.

There are mutliple ways of taking an intro or ending a jazz tune.

You can start from the V of the key, simply play the last 4 or 8 bars of the tune, try to incorporate a turnaroud and its several variations, the list is long....

You''ll find in this lesson 10 jazz guitar progressions with tabs, standard notation and audio files that work both as intros and endings for any jazz standards in C major.

Altough all these exercises are in the key of C major, it is possible and very important to transpose them in any key. 

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).

Dominant 7 chords are one of the most important chords to know, they can be found in many styles of music as blues, funk, pop and of course in jazz music. In this lesson we will see how dominant 7 chords are built and how to play them on guitar using 36 different voicing shapes.

In this lesson we will see how to harmonize the melodic minor scale in thirds with seventh chords.

In other words we will see how to build seventh chords by stacking thirds from each degree of the melodic minor scale.

Dominant 7 flat ninth chords (7b9) are generally related to the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale known as Phrygian dominant scale, which makes it the most obvious choice for improvising over 7b9 chords. However, we will see in this article that there are many other options.

This lesson contains five free guitar studies for beginners that outline the use of arpeggios over a Bb jazz blues progression.

There are different types of jazz blues progressions.

The one used in this tutorial is built with a secondary dominant (VI7), a passing diminished (#IVdim7) and a turnaround (I7, VI7, iim7, V7). 

This page lists the eBooks available for download on the website. All theses methods are in PDF format, so they can be printed and viewed on all types of media systems (tablets, smartphones and computers).

Joe's blues is a 12-bar blues taken from one of the many Joe Pass methods named "Joe Pass on Guitar". This lesson covers the first 24 bars of the original lesson. If you listen to the audio file provided with the book you can hear that there are a lot of mistakes in the transcription. That's why I have decided to transcribe those lines directly from what I heard.

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.