Insights, tips, and techniques to elevate your jazz guitar playing.
Off-the-cuff playing is the part of jazz most resistant to teaching. The vocabulary side is necessary but not sufficient; the spontaneity has to come from somewhere else. A look at the practice routine behind apparently-improvised playing.
Time is the thing every other element of jazz guitar leans on. UK guitarist Jamie Taylor's two MMC classes on rhythm guitar break down what time feel actually consists of — and how to build the vocabulary that makes it interesting.
Triads are the building blocks every guitarist learns first and quickly forgets. Tom Lippincott's Diatonic Triads Complete series — particularly the cluster class — brings them back as one of the most flexible harmonic resources on the instrument.
Relative pitch is what lets you follow a chord progression by ear, hear where a passage is heading, and play coherent ideas inside it. UK guitarist Jamie Taylor's "Gravity Concept" class lays out a working method for building it.
Tritone substitution is one of those jazz moves that sounds more sophisticated than it is. Any dominant 7th can be replaced by another dominant 7th a tritone away — same critical pair of notes (3rd and 7th), different bass line.
"Back cycle" is one of those terms that gets used loosely in jazz pedagogy. Strictly speaking, it's a chain of ii-V resolutions cycling backward through the circle of fifths to a target. Randy Johnston's MMC class lays out the specific lines and voicings.
"Going outside" is jazz shorthand for deliberate, controlled dissonance — playing material that doesn't belong inside the current chord, hearing the tension build, then resolving back. Genil Castro's MMC class walks through one of the cleanest entry points.
Self-comping — playing chords under 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. A look at the courses and the practice approach that actually move the needle.
Double stops — two notes played simultaneously — are one of those guitar techniques that look small on paper and end up doing a lot of work in practice. Ed Bickert, Barney Kessel, Johnny Smith, and Howard Roberts built large parts of their soloing vocabulary around them.
Phrasing is what separates technically competent improvising from soloing that actually feels alive. A list of tunes Steve Herberman uses for phrasing study — drawn from his MMC Jazz Phrasing series — and a working approach for using them.
In Sid Jacob’s latest class, he takes more than five jazz standards including Bill Evan’s “Very Early”,...
Sid Jacobs