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How to Play Jazz Guitar: Techniques, Chords and Jazz Scales
Guitar | Drupal.org
Guitar Chords: Extensions And Suspensions – Macri School Of Music

How to Play Jazz Guitar: Techniques, Chords and Jazz Scales

Posted: 12 Jun 2014 04:25 PM PDT

From Wes Montgomery to Al Di Meola, a huge number of classic and contemporary jazz guitarists have made their mark on the music world. While it might seem difficult, it's surprisingly easy to learn how to play jazz guitar with the right materials.

In this guide, you'll learn the basics of playing jazz guitar – from the most common scales and chords used in jazz music to the techniques and alternative tunings that form the basis of some of the most popular jazz pieces and guitar solos.

Ready to begin? Before you learn the specifics of jazz guitar, you'll need to master the basics of playing the electric guitar itself. Learn the fundamentals of guitar like scales, fingering, strumming, picking and theory in our Guitar Essentials course.

The theory of jazz guitar

Modern jazz guitar has a lot in common with blues, rock and other modern styles of guitar. Many of the scales used in jazz music are also common in blues – basic scales like the pentatonic major and minor scales, for example.

Almost all of the modes of the major scale are used in jazz guitar. For example, most jazz guitar licks and solos over minor chord progressions are composed (or in many cases, improvised) using the Dorian mode.

Other common modes in jazz guitar include the Mixolydian mode, which is the fifth mode of the major scale. The Mixolydian mode is frequently used in improvised jazz guitar melodies and solos.

In addition to the standard modes of the major scale, there are plenty of other scales used in jazz guitar. One of the most popular jazz scales is the Bebop scale, as well as its major, minor and dominant variations.

Do modes, scales and other musical theory terms confuse you? Modes are different variations on the standard major scale, with the beginning and end of each scale in different positions to create a completely different sound.

From intervals and chord structure to the different modes of the major scale, learn more about the scales used in jazz guitar for composition and improvisation with some quick lessons Jazz Guitar: Painless Scale Positions.

The technique of jazz lead guitar

Just like rock and blues guitar, most jazz guitar pieces consist of two parts: rhythm guitar, which plays chord progressions, and lead guitar. Jazz lead guitar involves a wide range of different techniques, licks and picking styles.

What separates jazz lead guitar from blues, modern rock and metal is the immense focus on improvisation. Many jazz pieces are built around basic chord progressions that make improvisation and lead guitar experimentation simple.

Improvising is a skill, just like learning to play scales and guitar solos quickly as you would in hard rock or heavy metal. The best lead guitar improvisers all share a good knowledge of scales and modes, allowing them to think up melodies as they play.

Another key part of improvising is having a bank of 'licks' in your memory. Licks are short musical phrases that last for one or two bars that you can use to fill in gaps in a guitar solo or melody and bridge two different improvisations together.

Hard Rock Guitar Improvising is designed for players interested in rock and metal guitar. However, the techniques it teaches you will be just as useful when it comes to improvising your own great solos over jazz chord progressions.

The technique of jazz rhythm guitar

Although jazz guitar chord progressions might sound simple, playing rhythm guitar in a jazz group is every bit as challenging as playing lead guitar. Jazz uses a variety of interesting chord progressions, making many rhythm parts surprisingly demanding.

At the core of jazz rhythm guitar is the popular II-V-I chord progression – a series of chords that's used in hundreds of popular jazz guitar pieces. This, and other popular chord progressions, should be part of your jazz guitar compositional knowledge.

While these chords form the basis of the jazz chord progression, they're not the only chords that are used in jazz. One of the most important chords in jazz is the seventh, in its major, minor, dominant and half and fully diminished forms.

The seventh chord is used to create movement within a chord progression, and can bridge the gap between otherwise unrelated chords. Some musicians refer to it as a 'color' chord – a type of chord that adds texture to otherwise bland progressions.

Adding the most popular chords used in jazz guitar to your musical lexicon will let you create interesting chord progressions and colorful compositions. Enroll in our Jazz Guitar Chords: Introduction to learn the most frequently used jazz chords.

Jazz guitar tunings and configurations

Just like rock and metal use alternative tunings like Drop-D, jazz guitar uses a wide variety of different tunings to create a unique sound. One of the most popular types of jazz guitar tuning is the regular tuning, not to be confused with standard tuning.

In regular tuning, the guitar's strings are all tuned to an even interval. This contrasts with the standard tuning of a guitar, in which every string except the B string (which uses a major-third interval) have an interval of five semitones separating them.

A popular regular tuning for jazz is the All Fourths tuning. As the name suggests, this method of tuning sets each string exactly a fourth apart, making the fretboard more logical and easier to navigate when improvising.

This suits the jazz guitar playing style, since a huge amount of jazz lead guitar solos involve improvised chromatic licks and unusual arpeggios. A wide variety of other regular tunings are used in jazz, including the popular major third regular tuning.

Do you want to set up your guitar for jazz improvisation? Learn how to configure your guitar and use any tuning – from heavy metal tunings like Drop D to the All Fourths tuning – in our Learn Guitar The Easy Way course.

Learn more about jazz guitar

Are you ready to become the next big jazz guitarist? Whether you want to play jazz guitar in front of an audience of simply jam to classic jazz tracks at home, being able to play jazz guitar is a great skill to add to your musical repertoire.

Before you start playing advanced jazz solos, read our blog post on guitar scales to master the basic major, minor scales and the modes used in jazz music. Our post on jazz chord progressions is also a great resource for learning rhythm jazz guitar.

Guitar | Drupal.org

Posted: 21 Feb 2008 10:49 AM PST

This is a suite of modules that make it possible to generate guitar chord diagrams. It comes with both a cck field and an input filter, so users can attach chord diagrams to nodes, or embed them directly in the content of a page.

For example, the notation for the chord diagram on the right is: x,3,2,0,1,0. The x indicates a string that is not played, and the numbers indicate the position of fingers on each string.

When using the input filter, the chord notation must be surrounded by square brackets: [x,3,2,0,1,0]. The name of the chord can be specified (but is optional): [C major:x,3,2,0,1,0]

When using the CCK field, the chord name and the chord notation each have their own field: C major and x,3,2,0,1,0.

Guitar Chords: Extensions And Suspensions – Macri School Of Music

Posted: 15 Jun 2014 07:33 AM PDT

Chords are constructed from roots, thirds and fifths. These intervals come from the major scale where the scale degrees produce different triads, some major and some minor (and one diminished). Guitar players add chord tones and extensions to triads by incorporating other degrees from the major scale. These added scale degrees include 2nds, 4ths, 6ths, 7ths, 9ths, 11ths and 13ths.

Today's lesson will take different degrees from a major scale and add them to triad based chords.

When chord tones extend an octave above the 7th, are called extensions and numbered to mirror their position above the first seven notes of the major scale. For example, 2 becomes 9, 4 becomes 11 and 6 becomes 13.

C D E F G A B C D E F G A B

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

It is important to know that the 1, 3, 5 and 7 are always counted the same regardless of the register. Only 2, 4 and 6 get renumbered when they extend beyond the 7th, and only get renumbered once.

When an extension like 9, 11 or 13 is present in a chord, then the 7th is supposed to be included too, plus any extensions before the one in the chord name. For example,

C Major- 1-3-5, C-E-G

Cmaj7: 1-3-5-7, C-E-G-B

Cmaj9: 1-3-5-7-9, C-E-G-B-D

Cmaj11: 1-3-5-7-9-11, C-E-G-B-D-F

Cmaj13: 1-3-5-7-9-11-13, C-E-G-B-D-F-A

It's pretty tough to play seven notes on a six string instrument, so we try to play the most important notes in the chord and skip the less important ones. Generally speaking, the following notes are the most important:

1) The third, because it tells the listener whether the chord is major or minor.

2) The 7th, because it tells the listener if the chord is dominant.

3) The extension, because how can you have a 13th chord without a 13th?

Contrary to what you may think, the root and fifth are not very important to defining harmony. As a result, you can leave them out especially if the bassist is playing the roots.

A chord you see alot is the suspended chord. There are two common types of sus chords:

The suspended second (sus2) that lowers the 3rd down to the second, and the suspended fourth (sus4) which means the 3rd of the chord is raised up to the 4th . This gives the chord an unresolved or suspended sound that wants to resolve back to the third.

C: 1-3-5, C-E-G

Csus2: 1-2-5, C-D-G

Csus4: 1-4-5, C-F-G

Another type of chord that you will see is the "add" chord. For example, add9, add11 and add13. This is telling you to add the extension either on top of a power chord (root/perfect fifth) or a triad, skipping the seventh and other extensions.

C: 1-3-5, C-E-G

Cadd9: 1-3-5-9, C-E-G-D

Cadd11: 1-3-5-11, C-E-G-F

Cadd13: 1-3-5-13, C-E-G-A

Because the 2nd and 9th's interval are the same note, as well as the 4th's and 11th's, you may see the chords above stacked and transcribed this way also:

Cadd2: 1-2-3-5, C-D-E-G

Cadd4: 1-3-4-5, C-E-F-G

Notice that these chords are the very same notes as the chords before them? The only difference is in how the notes are stacked and the chords name. Guitar players often stack chord members out of order anyway, so it's hard to follow a strict convention. As a result, 2nds and 9th's and 4th's and 11th's are often used interchangeably.

Guitarists not only need to rearrange chord components at times but also leave out in order to make a chord shape physically playable and pleasant sounding. This is especially true as you add more chord tones and extensions.

For example, a dominant 13th chord is supposed to be stacked 1-3-5-b7-9-11-13. This would be physically impossible to play on the guitar. In an instance like this, you at least try to retain the 3rd, b7th and the extension that the chord is named after. So a C13 might be played 1-3-b7-13, 1-b7-3-13.

Chords Guitar