Welcome back! In this article I wanna talk about how to sound like a legit jazz.
We’ve all read, or at least try understand, one or another guitar jazz lesson, but somehow we
are always feel like we are not there yet. Well I’m going to teach a way to make a simple 4note
chord into a jazz chord, without changing any note at all. This progression I’m going to show is
gonna go from sounding really normal to sounding really cool.
Most us are used to playing the same chord across the fretboard; we don’t really do smooth
transitions these days. Guitar player are so used to playing power chords or normal barre
chords. Well jazz players tend to smooth out progressions, meaning that they tend to move as
little as possible to create a smoother sound. This doesn’t mean that they don’t play a lot of
chords, it just means they smooth them out. So anyway, let’s check out a normal IIm7 V7
Imaj7
progression, which is very common in the jazz world:
All the chords I just showed you are in root position, which is alright, but not very interesting.
Let’s check out another option. For instance, let’s move as little as possible:
The first and the last chord were in root position, while the second was a 2nd inversion. See?
Just by playing the second inversion of a G7 we already made the progression sound way
smoother than it what it was before. This is just an example; you could start by playing the first
inversion of the first chord (Dm7) and move to closest chord like this:
It already sounds so much like a jazz progression and that’s because this is what jazz players
do. They don’t usually jump a lot on the fretboard, they try to smooth out as much as possible.
You could obviously keep doing this with the same progression but starting on different
inversions like this:
Or This:
All of those progression I just showed you came out from the original IIm7 V7
Imaj7.
In fact it
is a IIm7 V7
Imaj7,
just played in a different way.
I hope you enjoyed this lesson and please remember to check out our entire database of videos.
