How to Start Playing Jazz Guitar?
i have about a year and a half of experiance on guitar and have a decent rock blues and funk guitarist. but i always wanted to learn jazz on guitar. but theres so much to start off with. i mean i can work on chords, scales, comping, voicings and arpeggios. what should i start with?
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I’ve been working on developing my jazz playing for a few years now. It’s not my focus, but it has had a positive effect of the rest of my playing.
I would get a good jazz fake book that has some jazz songs you know (for me it was things like Take Five and My Funny Valentine). Try to learn some early stuff first… pre-bop stuff. Once you hit the bop era the changes and melodies get much more complex.
For a quick leg-up on comping, learn drop-2 voicings with the lowest note on the A string for the 4 most-common 7th chords (major 7, minor 7, dominant 7, minor 7 flat 5/half-diminished 7), then learn drop-3 voicings with the low note on the low E for those same chords. Now you’ve got 8 chord shapes with the 3rd, 5th, and 7th all on the DGB strings, with the root on the E or A. From there you should have no problem running down some simple charts… it should sound pretty jazzy too!
In order to start playing Jazz the person (you) must first come to listen to it fully, so…just listen to great jazz guitarist, Joe Pass, Wes Montgomery, and more current artists such as Kurt Rosenwinkel etc, just start listening and it will come to you.