If you’re here, you’re likely desperate to untangle the mystery of learning how to play jazz guitar.
Help is at hand…
Scroll down to find everything on the site related to jazz guitar, along with links to our best online jazz guitar lessons:
What You’ll Find On This Page
- An overview of how to learn jazz guitar in 5 steps
- A selection of free jazz guitar lessons to get you started learning
How To Learn To Play Jazz Guitar In A Nutshell (Quick Start Guide):
Question:
Are you banging your head against a brick wall trying to figure out how to learn jazz guitar?
Maybe you’ve tried some jazz guitar lessons in the past but were put off by all the complex theory.
Perhaps you’ve got a few jazz guitar books that felt as exciting as reading a dictionary, and are now gathering dust on your bookshelf…(Hint: those jazz guitar books make great doorstops!)
But:
Although jazz guitar takes time to learn…
Any guitarist with the basics down can develop the skill to be a confident improviser and rhythm player to participate in jams and gigs (or even just to enjoy by yourself at home).
Here’s your blueprint in 5 simple steps:
Listen To Jazz:
Listening to jazz is the first step is the MOST overlooked by aspiring jazzers.
But it’s crucial.
If you have no reference point for your ears, you won’t be able to make any of your guitar improvisation (or anything else) sound remotely like jazz.
Start by grabbing a few classic jazz guitar albums. Here’s some I like to recommend for jazz guitar newbies:
- Wes Montgomery – Smokin’ at the Half Note
- Lenny Breau – Live at Bourbon Street
- Joe Pass – Intercontinental
Take a moment to listen and watch this cool performance of Impressions by Wes Montgomery:
Learn Melodies and Chords to Some Jazz Standards on Guitar:
Next, put all the jazz theory aside for a while.
Instead:
Get your hands dirty simply by learning the melody and chords to 3 to 5 jazz standards.
This will give you some songs right out of the gate you can use for the following steps, and is another way to get the sound of jazz into your ears without getting caught up trying to sound like a pro improviser right out of the gate.
Map The Guitar Fretboard:
Jazz is a bit different on guitar compared to playing other styles of music like rock or blues.
The trickiest challenge with jazz guitar improvisation or comping is negotiating the constant key changes. Some jazz tunes have 6 or more key changes per tune!
So your navigation on the guitar fretboard needs to be rock solid.
You need to have an intuitive sense of how to find the notes in any given key – for both jazz guitar comping and jazz guitar improvisation.
Arpeggios, scales, and jazz guitar chord shapes are important building blocks of this knowledge.
Knowing the common jazz chord shapes over the fretboard, and being able to recall them at will, is a must for any improviser…and it’s usually the first stumbling block for an aspiring jazz guitarist.
But be aware:
Jazz Guitar scales and arpeggios aren’t enough for being able to improvise in a jazz style. Here’s what you need to do next…
Learn Jazz Guitar Licks To Build Your Vocabulary:
Have you ever noticed someone improvise and although they play all the correct notes, something doesn’t sound quite right?
The reason:
Although they might be using good scale and arpeggio choices, they probably aren’t using enough jazz vocabulary in their solos.
Here’s the thing:
Scales and arpeggios are a bit like the ‘alphabet’, but jazz lines are more like the vocabulary, i.e. the ‘words’ of jazz.
Don’t get me wrong:
The alphabet is important to know for any language. But we don’t talk using the letters of the alphabet – we use words.
Jazz licks, jazz lines, jazz phrases – these are all different names for the same thing:
Short, compact melodies and ideas that can be drawn upon to thread together longer, musical-sounding melodies in your improvisation.
You can learn jazz lines on guitar by:
- Noticing what other players do
- Recordings
- Transcriptions of solos (either those you do yourself OR ones already published)
- Books
- FretDojo’s jazz guitar lessons (e.g. I have a whole “Licktionary” in my membership program here)
A jazz guitarist learns several of these phrases from memory and also learns to play them across the fretboard in any position and any key.
By drawing on cool-sounding melodies like this when you solo, can you guess how your playing will sound?
The answer:
Very melodic!
A combination of using jazz guitar licks and scale/arpeggio tones can result in a convincing sounding solo just like that.
But:
Our journey isn’t finished yet…
Our adventure is about to get very interesting, my Jazz Guitar Jedi. Onwards to the next step!
Extract Jazz Concepts From What You Learn:
This is the point where your own musical personality starts to blossom in the jazz guitar journey.
You start to notice things you really enjoy about the jazz vocabulary you learn.
Perhaps it’s an interesting cross-rhythm used in a line.
Maybe it’s a certain way to voice jazz guitar chords without roots like Ed Bikert.
Or it’s a cool harmonic substitution you notice in a Joe Pass lick you picked up.
Spending time looking carefully at material YOU like the sound of empowers you.
It gives you the ability to develop your own distinct musical ideas.
This is where you start truly walking the path of a jazz player. You transition from being a jazz guitar student to a jazz guitar artist.
By learning the vocabulary of others, extracting your own concepts, then using those concepts as a springboard for your own ideas, you can start to express your own unique musical personality.
The best part:
The audience loves it when a musician expresses his unique voice. And that’s the wonderful thing about jazz – the ability to bring out the unique self-expression of everyone who walks on its path.
FretDojo Gold Club Membership:
With FretDojo Jazz Guitar Club membership, my online jazz guitar school, you get access on a subscription basis to my 50+ courses where you’ll learn some of the most loved jazz standards – and develop your jazz guitar skills along the way.
It’s my most popular jazz guitar curriculum and it’s been going for several years with hundreds of members. We regularly release new jazz guitar lessons in the membership so you’ll always have new tunes material to add to your arsenal.
I’ve participated in TWO 12 week courses with an internationally famous music university…
I can safely say the investment in lessons with Greg has been worth more than 95% of all the other formal and informal education I’ve managed to derive for myself.
Gordon Hooper, South Africa
Greg O’Rourke has a wonderful teaching style – it’s straightforward, sold, it makes sense.
I’ve been playing for so long by sound and feel, and I really needed a good, strong solid foundation for how to understand the fretboard and know where to navigate on the fretboard. FretDojo has been super-helpful to me in getting that done.
Mike Haas, USA
Joe Pass’s advice to students was ‘learn as many tunes as you can’ – and you’ll have no shortage of this in the FretDojo Jazz Guitar Club Membership. It’s incredible value and a way to access all of FretDojo’s jazz guitar lessons and courses for an affordable monthly fee.
Read here for more information, or sign up for membership here >>
Bonus: Free Sample Jazz Guitar Lessons
This website features several free sample posts on various topics. This gives you a bit of an idea of my teaching style and approach and is a good introduction to the above courses on offer.
Here are some of my most popular jazz guitar lesson posts on this website:
- Jazz Guitar Improvisation For Beginners – 7 Simple Steps: This post is a good introduction on getting started with jazz improvisation using a common guitar scale that you likely already know well!
- How To Improve Your Jazz Guitar Improvisation: Secrets To A Stellar Practice Routine: This in-depth guide is a good case study of the steps that we covered earlier on this page.
- Watermelon Man (Jazz Standard): Complete How-To For Jazz Guitar: A good sample example lesson of the steps I use in my FretDojo Academy Membership for learning the jazz standards.
- Joe Pass Chord Phrases: Get some tasty Joe Pass chord licks under your belt in this succinct video lesson.
- Or see all Jazz Guitar Lessons posts here >>
If you have any questions about our courses on offer, you can get in touch here >>
What did you think of the information on this page? Do you have any tips YOU would like to share about learning jazz guitar? Let me know by leaving a comment about this jazz guitar lessons guide below…
~ Greg O’Rourke, BMus, Hons (ANU)
Founder, Fret Dojo
