So this is Week 2 of the Jazz Guitar Crash course, I’m supposed to learn Autumn Leaves. I’m familiar with the song because I learned to play bass to it for a few gigs, but I encountered a hiccup: I don’t have any of these new chords memorized! Imagine my surprise as I sat down … Continue reading Day 170: Trying to Learn Autumn Leaves

Congratulations! We've made it to Friday in the first week of the Jazz Guitar crash course! We've gone over what makes up the major 7, dominant 7, and minor 7 chords, and we've gone over certain chord variations. To really drive home the point, let's talk about intervals and scales in more detail. The terms … Continue reading Day 167: Why We’re Even Doing This

The point of learning all of these chords is to help visualize where the notes are on the guitar's fretboard. If you look at all of the chord charts next to each other, and count the strings from right-to-left (this is common practice with guitar notation), you'll see that the D chords (and FM7 in … Continue reading Day 166: Variations

Here’s yet another set of chord voicings to learn. If you know the minor chords on guitar, we’re omitting the octave note and flattening it one full tone, or two frets. Normally, I would like to use the A minor scale as an example when talking about minor because it has the same natural notes … Continue reading Day 165: Minor 7 Chords

More interesting chords today. If you know the major chords, you turn it into a 7 chord by taking what would be the 7th note in the scale and flattening it by one semitone, or one fret. In contrast to the notes in the “major 7” chords from yesterday, we’re flattening what would be the … Continue reading Day 164: Dominant 7 Chords

These chords are interesting. If you know the major chords, major 7 chords just take out one of the octaves and “flatten” it by one semitone or one fret. Just like all the other chords, muting strings is also key to a clean sound! The C major chord is a great example because all of … Continue reading Day 163: Major 7 Chords

Alright... So we're doing this! Jazz guitar crash course week 1 is memorizing chord voicings that are very common in jazz (and pop): Major 7 chords, Dominant 7 chords, and Minor 7 chords. I should confess: before researching, I didn't know that "7" chords (like C7, D7, E7, etc.) are the same as dominant 7 … Continue reading Day 162: Guitar Study – Week 1