Whether you’ve been playing jazz guitar for a while or are new to jazz music, one thing you’ll most definitely need to take your jazz guitar playing to the next level is a solid understanding of jazz guitar chords.
This post will introduce you to the basic jazz guitar chord shapes that will likely influence up to 75% of your jazz chord playing.
These jazz guitar shapes can be played over virtually any jazz tune, meaning once you have them down, you’ll be ready to sit in with the rhythm section at the next jam session.
Extended & Altered Dominant Guitar Chord Shapes
If you want to play jazz guitar like Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Joe Pass, Wes Montgomery, or Jim Hall, you’ll need a practice plan. If you are spending hours noodling on your guitar and not seeing results when you go to play jazz guitar, then perhaps you need to overhaul how you practice.
If you learn these basic shapes, you’ll be well on your way to jazz guitar mastery. They work for any jazz style on the guitar—traditional jazz guitar, jazz fusion, blues, and modern jazz styles, too.
Internalizing these chords and jazz chord progressions is vital to being a jazz musician. Many guitarists ignore this extremely fundamental part of musicianship. If you want to be the best jazz guitar player you can be, you shouldn’t put it off any longer!
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For the most part, jazz music is built with tertian harmony, which means its chords are built on thirds (we’re leaving quartal harmony aside for this one). Most Western music uses triads to build chords. Triads are built from a root and have a 3rd and a 5th stacked on:
7th chords add an additional piece of harmonic information into the mix (either a major or a minor 7th interval from the root). This gives us four notes:
Adding a B to a C major triad gives us a Cmaj7 chord. When you change the 3rd, 5th, or 7th’s interval distance from the root, you alter the chord quality. This process gives you minor, dominant, half-diminished, and fully diminished chords.
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Dominant chords are an essential part of the jazz sound but are also important for other genres, like rock, blues, and even classical music. Dominant chords are used by rock, blues, classical, and jazz musicians and composers to resolve chord progressions, change keys, and add a blue sound to their music.
The “dominant” sound probably has the greatest number of musical applications, especially in jazz. You’ll want to spend extra time on dominant voicings because they are so important to the jazz and jazz blues sounds.
Check out our blog post on dominant 7th voicings and inversions on the guitar , and check out tips for memorizing dominant chords .
Easy Jazz Guitar Chord Chart
Half-diminished chords are a staple of the minor ii-V-i progression. Diminished seventh have a variety of uses, including passing chords and as the v°7 chord in the harmonic minor key.
Applying jazz harmony to the guitar might seem like a daunting task. On a piano, everything is linear: low to high, left to right. There is only one axis of pitch. However, the guitar has two axes of pitch. You can move up the neck to change pitch or move across the strings.
At first glance, this seems like an unnecessary complication. But it’s actually a feature and not a bug. As jazz guitarists, we can double notes, enriching chords with unison pitches with different timbres.
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Jazz guitarists can also break the twelve-tone system by bending notes. By doing so, they access the microtonal sounds present in the blues.
With music, the more you learn, the more you realize that there’s more to learn! Once you feel comfortable with these voicings, there are so many things you can do to develop your own approach to jazz music. Once you have the tools, you’ll need to develop your own jazz sound.
Improve your understanding of chords, scales, chord scales, and chord-scale relationships. Chords and scales are two different ways of organizing the same musical information and relationships.
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Understanding how the major scale helps us construct chords, chord progressions, and chord scales is crucial. If you want a primer for getting started, check out Brent’s e-book “Zero to Improv .”
Well-trained jazz musicians have a deep aural understanding of the interval relationships that make up jazz voicings. They can hear a guitar player play chords, and they’ll be able to tell you their quality even without having a perfect pitch.
To play jazz in the moment, you’ll need to rely on your ear more than your eyes! You need to develop your ear to understand the musical context of a chord or line or to hear the rhythm section’s and soloist’s interplay. You’ll need to hear the chord changes as they happen.
Easy Beginner Jazz Guitar Chords
Apart from memorizing these shapes physically, you need to memorize them aurally. There are many ways to do this, but a great way to start is to be able to sing the chords as an arpeggio.
Play one note on your guitar, like the root or the 5th, and sing the rest of the voicing. This exercise will help you internalize pitch relationships, and your musicianship will skyrocket.
The best way to learn jazz is to play jazz. Jazz standards are the canvases that jazz musicians paint sounds on. Learning jazz standards will improve your knowledge of chord progressions, help you get better at playing melodies, and improve your jazz solos.
The 4 Most Important Chords To Learn In Gypsy Jazz Guitar
It’s important to know a bit about the key jazz guitar players who pushed jazz guitar forward throughout and beyond the twentieth century. Note that many of the following guitarists lived through several eras of jazz guitar and played in many styles. This list is just intended as an introduction to key guitar players you need to check out.
The guitar and piano (and double bass!) can play chord melodies, unlike other instruments. For those who don’t know, chord melodies are exactly what they sound like—a single chordal instrumentalist who simultaneously plays both the melody and harmony of a tune.
Though present in folk, bluegrass, blues, and occasionally in rock (hello, Steve Howe), chord melodies are most prominently played by jazz guitarists. A working knowledge of harmony, voice leading, chordal improvisation, and chord progressions is an essential prerequisite to playing the melody and harmony of a jazz song simultaneously.
Must Know Gypsy Jazz Chords│gypsy Jazz Lessons
Check out our video on how to play a chord melody on a jazz standard to get started on your first song. After you get a few chord melodies under your fingertips, you can begin improvizing in the idiom, which is a very rewarding experience—whether you play an electric guitar or acoustic guitar or already own a bunch of jazz guitars.
If you have spent countless hours in the practice room playing tons of jazz but not improving, you’re not alone. Many musicians practice, sure.
By not practicing correctly, these musicians waste a bunch of time working on the things they can play and never progressing on the things they can’t.
Jazz Guitar Chords And Applications
If you feel this describes you, it’s time for a change. Ready to overhaul how you practice? Come check out the Inner Circle and see what we’re all about .
Not only will you learn a new jazz standard every month and hang out with avid jazz lovers, but you’ll be able to quickly accelerate your jazz guitar playing through our Jazz Guitar Accelerator Course, which is designed to help you achieve technical mastery on the guitar!
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