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To many people learning to play Jazz Guitar is the ultimate challenge. For a start there are so many different types of Jazz music.
We have Swing Jazz which was the style used by the great Django Reinhardt when playing his amazing Gypsy Jazz guitar numbers. We have a completely different style of Jazz guitar played by George Benson. We have another style known as "Fusion" which is a mixture of two styles played together. The two most common styles of fusion are Jazz/Funk and Jazz/Blues.
The first problem new players of Jazz guitar have to encounter is trying to get their chords to sound "Jazzy". No matter how many beginners chords you learn take it from me you will not sound "Jazzy". The answer as usual is to study some theory so you understand why some things sound "Jazzy" and some don't.
When you spend an hour or two playing your guitar you may just by chance find a chord that sounds like it could be a Jazz chord but you won’t know why it sounds "Jazzy" or even what its name is but by spending that same hour or two on theory you would understand what you are playing and why.
Members who subscribe to Guitar Members learn all the theory they need to be able to play Jazz guitar.
What are 9ths, 11ths, 13ths, #11b13ths, etc? Learn Jazz scales. Unlike other styles of guitar playing where one scale can be used over all the chords in the song this is not the case with Jazz. You have to play a different scale every time you change chord.
Find out the secret of playing octaves. You can also play along to all your favourite Jazz numbers by downloading the top quality MP3 backing tracks available on our site.
To find out the secrets to becoming a good Jazz guitarist join us now.
Note: In the content above we have the expression #11b13ths and some of you, especially beginners, may be wondering what this is. In music the symbol # means 'sharp' and the symbol b means 'flat'.
We cover in detail what sharps and flats are in our beginners courses elsewhere but basically the fret between an F and a G note on the guitar (whether it is a Guitar or Bass Guitar) is both F sharp and G flat. Rather than write the word sharp we would normally write the symbol #. Similarly with the flat notes we would normally write the letter lower case b.
So to go back to our expression #11b13ths we are saying that this chord includes the normal chord shape but with an sharpened 11th note of the scale and a flattened 13th note of the scale. Don't worry about understanding what that means here, we cover all of this in our courses and the courses we recommend. |
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