Self-comping — playing accompaniment chords underneath your own solo lines on a single instrument — is one of the harder things to do well on the jazz guitar. It's also one of the most useful. The skill takes you from being a soloist who needs a rhythm section behind them to a player who can sit down in front of an audience with no band and make a tune feel complete. The path from "I can do it slow" to "I can do it idiomatically at tempo" is steeper than most players expect.
The MMC catalog has several classes that hit this directly. The one most squarely about the topic is John Stowell and Steve Herberman's Comping & Self Comping While Soloing, which uses "Love For Sale" as the working tune and includes recorded play-alongs you can drill the technique against.
What makes self-comping hard
The mechanical difficulty is obvious — you need a chord and a line happening at the same time. But the deeper difficulty is interpretive. A rhythm-section comper has license to be active because the soloist is somewhere else in the texture. When you're comping under your own line, the same activity becomes noise. The best self-compers play very little, very deliberately, and let the chord land between phrases of the melody.
That means the work isn't really about learning more voicings; it's about learning where NOT to play, and how to make a sparse chord feel rhythmically essential rather than incidental.
The minimum vocabulary
Three layers are worth working on in parallel:
- Guide-tone voicings. Two notes (the 3rd and 7th of each chord) are enough to imply the entire chord underneath a melody. Sid Jacobs' Guide Tones for Jazz Lines, Comping and Chord Melody covers the technique in depth — including the connection to bebop lines and chord-melody playing that makes guide-tone comping such an efficient solo-guitar tool.
- Rhythm vocabulary, in isolation. Tom Lippincott's Comping the Blues, part 1: Comping Rhythms works on this directly — what rhythms to use and why, with the voicings deliberately kept in the background. Most "how to comp" classes invert this priority, which is why so many self-compers end up rhythmically generic.
- Time, with a metronome, brutally. Self-comping exposes timing problems that get hidden in ensemble playing. There's no drummer to anchor; if your time wobbles, the whole performance wobbles. Practice with a metronome on 2 and 4 (not all four beats) and resist the temptation to play through wobble moments.
Beyond two-note voicings
Once guide-tone comping is reliable, the natural next step is filling in more harmonic color while keeping the texture transparent. Tom Lippincott's Advanced Jazz Guitar Harmony: Drop 2 and 4, Drop 2 and 3 covers the practical four-note voicings that show up in working players' chord-melody arrangements. These give you the option of either striking a full chord between melodic phrases or sustaining a thinner version under a continuing line.
Practice approach
Pick one standard you know cold. Don't try to comp-and-solo from the start — separate the layers. Play just the chords with the time and feel you'd want underneath a soloist. Then play just the melody, paying attention to where you naturally breathe. Then overlay: chord on beat 1, melody continues, chord on the &-of-3, melody continues. Build it up rhythm by rhythm. Recording yourself is essential — what feels balanced from the inside often sounds chord-heavy or chord-light from the outside.
The Stowell/Herberman class is the most direct training for this approach because it gives you their actual playing as reference points, and the play-alongs let you drill against a real bass-and-drum bed before going fully solo.
