Jazz Chord Voicings from Giant Steps by John Coltrane

How’s it going, guys? This is John McClennan and I’m here with guitarcontrol.com, bringing you this video lesson. We’re looking at the first four bars of changes to John Coletrane’s “Giant Steps”. What we’re going to start out here it just with some chord voicings. Previously we were working at getting some chord voicings on the lower part of the neck, now let’s go up higher. We’re going to play some chords on the top four strings here. The first chord is a B major 7, and be sure to click the link below for the tab. Here we have 9, 11, 11, 11. The next chord is going to be D13: 10, 11, 12, 12. This is a great chord. It almost looks like you might know it as a B minor 7, but when you put the G in the bass you’ve got a G major 9 chord. And this chord would be 9, 11, 10, 10. After that G major 11 we’re going to go E flat 7, which would be 8, 10, 9, 10; resolving to E flat major 7: 8, 8, 8, 10. And then A minor 7: 7, 9, 8, 10. And then D9, which would be 10, 9, 7, 10. And then, of course, resolving that II-V-I to a G6-9: 9, 9, 10, 10. That’s all the chord changes there. Play these chords and practice them over the tune. It’s pretty fast. You can play it slow. Slow your metronome down. Just go one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. Just work on getting a clean sound. Remember, all these chords are going to be great for applying in any other jazz tune as well, all these voicings that I’m showing you. So just simple things like playing a II-V-I, you can play that like in “Autumn Leaves” or something like that, a jazz standard, very useful stuff. So this song is so beneficial in a ton of ways. Click the link below for the tab and we’ll catch you in the next video.