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My name is Dirk Laukens, jazz guitar player, teacher, and webmaster of this jazz guitar website that started in 2003. I’m here to help you with your jazz guitar playing, so if you have any questions, contact me.
Learning jazz guitar and improvisation isn’t always easy, but that doesn’t mean the learning process has to be complicated. Our jazz guitar lessons, forum, and courses are designed to make learning jazz guitar easy and fun.
Our free jazz guitar lessons cover a great variety of topics going from traditional jazz guitar to modern jazz styles.
Whether you are just beginning to learn jazz guitar or you are already an experienced rock or blues player, our lessons will get you playing jazz guitar in no time!
If you are a beginning jazz guitar player, check out these lessons to get you started:
Intro to Jazz Guitar Chords
Jazz guitar chords sound great and are a lot of fun to play. This tutorial will teach you the 17 must-know jazz guitar chords you need to play jazz guitar.
Intro to Guitar Arpeggios
Arpeggios are the best tool to play over chord progressions. In this guide, you will learn how to use arpeggios to outline the harmony of a song in your guitar solos.
Intro to Jazz Guitar Scales
Scales are an essential tool for jazz guitar improvisation. This lesson teaches you 7 essential jazz guitar scales that you can use to play over almost any jazz song.
Jazz Guitar licks
Learning jazz licks is a great way to get new sounds into your ears. In this jazz guitar lesson, you will learn 20 bebop licks you can instantly use in your jazz solos.
Autumn Leaves
Autumn Leaves is a great jazz song for beginners. In this tutorial, you will learn the melody of Autumn Leaves and play a guitar solo over the tune's chord changes.
Summertime
Summertime is another great standard for beginners. In this video lesson, you will learn the melody and how to improvise over Summertime's chords.
- Online course environment (lifetime access) + printable PDF (319 pages).
- 87 classic jazz guitar patterns (+ variations) that are easy to memorize and use in your solos.
- 8 video studies over jazz standards that put these patterns in a musical context.
- 14 smaller studies that focus on how you can use a single pattern throughout a jazz standard.
- 75 jazz guitar licks that illustrate how you can use patterns in your phrases.
There are many guitar chords, and you need to master a wide variety of chords to play jazz guitar. For beginner jazz guitar students, it’s not easy to know where to start learning jazz chords. On top of that, you need to get the most common chord progressions under your fingers and develop a good right-hand rhythm technique. Here, you will start with basic jazz chords and work your way up to more complex chord shapes.
In our jazz guitar chords section, you will learn all the basic guitar chords and chord progressions you need to play jazz guitar.
For every chord type there is a printable guitar chord chart and jazz guitar comping exercises to get you going in the practice room.
Popular Chord Lessons:
Our Most Popular Jazz Guitar Lessons (Top 10)
- The Beginner's Guide to Jazz Guitar
- 10 Essential Jazz Chord Progressions
- The Girl From Ipanema Chords
- All Of Me (Melody & Solo)
- The Blues Scales (Minor and Major)
- The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
- Jazz Guitar Patterns & Phrases Vol 1
- Blue Bossa (Melody & Solos)
- Introduction to Guitar Modes
- Jazz Blues Chord Progressions
Transcribing and learning licks from your favorite guitar players is a great way to expand your jazz vocabulary and learn the jazz language. By transcribing licks from your favorite jazz guitar albums and studying the concepts behind these licks, you train your ears and absorb new sounds and ideas that will enrich your jazz guitar soloing.
Our jazz guitar licks section is a collection of guitar riffs, licks, and patterns in the style of great jazz guitarists such as Pat Metheny, George Benson, Django Reinhardt, Joe Pass, Mike Stern, John Scofield, Charlie Christian, Wes Montgomery, but also jazz greats such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane.
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Jazz guitar scales are essential when learning how to play jazz guitar. Our lessons cover all scales you need to know to get you started improvising over jazz standards, such as the major scale, the pentatonic and blues scales, the seven guitar modes, chord scales, the diminished scale, the altered scale, and many more.
When learning jazz guitar, one of the best ways to improve quickly is by playing jazz standards. By playing jazz tunes, you bring all the technical material you have studied, such as chords, scales, arpeggios, and voice leading, together and actually start playing music.
Some easy songs to begin with are Autumn Leaves and Blue Bossa. Other important standards include the blues, the minor blues, All The Things You Are, Summertime, Billie’s Bounce, Watermelon Man, and All Blues.
In the guitar gear section you will learn how to get a jazz sound and find the gear you need to play jazz guitar. Choosing a guitar and amp for jazz can be a bit confusing since there is so much choice. The articles below will help you choose the best (archtop) jazz guitar and amp.