Hey, guys. Welcome back. It's Marc from Jazz Guitar Lessons. And in this quick mini podcast again, I want to answer a question why we learn jazz. And you may be listening to this or watching some content on YouTube, including my content or going over to True Fire and seeing how many jazz classes there are. I mean, I'll give you a short and concise answer.
Jazz is the the style, and I hesitate to call it a style of music. Jazz is the thing we study in order to make everything else easier and faster. That's it. Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way. My name is Marc, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy a French accent, make sure to subscribe.
So you may be a funk player and a strong one at death. You may be a pop or folk player or a blues or rock player, and you may hit a wall like get stuck in a rut. And I can pretty much guarantee that if you do get on board jazz studies it. It will unlock a whole bunch of things.
And not because jazz is superior in any regards, but because melodically, harmonically and rhythmically, jazz will push the boundaries a bit more and it makes it makes it easier. And I've done it for myself. I'll tell you my personal life story I want really wanted to pursue music further. And I was a rocker and shredder. I had some, you know, progressive rock sensibilities and that was my late teen age.
And eventually I was like, Yeah, okay, I want to take the plunge and I want to do things right. Okay, fine. I can grab John Petrucci, you know, guitarist and Dream Theater. I can do this rock discipline book and learn all the scales. I could read Steven's blog or I could do what the guys tell me to do, like Segovia scales and or sweet picking arpeggios and I can watching Malmsteen and go yeah, he plays fast.
That's pretty cool, right? And then I encountered morally mature mentors and musicians that had been around that played important gigs. I played with big bands and in choirs and musicians that did like small cocktail epic gigs, like corporate events and jazz original artists, like people that would compose and tour and play their own music on different instruments. And basically the message I had was, Look, kid, if you want to do music, like you got to either study classical and it would be preferable that you start at age five or ten and you get serious lessons from an early age on guitar, which I had not done.
So this sort of eliminated that issue or you do jazz. I'm like, All right. And I'm like, I don't really like jazz. I remember I remember hearing jazz and thinking just it sounds off, right? It just there's a lot of wrong notes. It seems like it's going nowhere. I don't really hear it. And then later on, I realize it's almost like there was colors in it that I couldn't really see yet.
So that was the that was the the M.O. for pushing music further. Because if you want to go to college or university or if you want to take any kinds of lessons, you don't need to become a jazz player and grab an archtop But you should at least learn these concepts because they will make you progress much faster.
You'll understand harmony, you'll be able to accompany in different situations, you'll be able to memorize song forms. Your sense of rhythm and time is going to get better. You're going to hear more. You're going to be able to write charts, you know, right? I'm like, Oh, well, that's a fair deal. Instead of just studying every new Dream Theater record that comes out or transcribing Marty Friedman's, you know, solos, I could just go and study jazz.
It's been done before. Oh, look at that. Berkeley's done that like since the seventies. Pretty cool, right? So I did the thing with me is that I forgot to give back to the others. That's sure. I did some indie rock gigs with, like pretty big venues. That was awesome. I played with singers, I played in funk bands. I played like strictly blues rock gigs as well.
And I was hired for anything and everything that wasn't really classical, like weddings and whatever, which was fun. And I still did that. But for me, I got into jazz as a passion. I got passionate about jazz and I sort of sort of became a jazz instructor in that. That got the best of you. However, for most guys I music, they can go through to the college level and just learn jazz for the benefits of it as a springboard and then keep their own musical endeavors that are not strictly jazz, not strictly speaking, improvised music.
And that's that's how I got into jazz. That's a really fair way to go about it. So that's the short answer to why why we learn jazz. Now, here's a process for learning it that I laid out on the website. It's on the blog. Jazz guitar lessons dot net slash process. That's a long document. And again, mind you, you don't need to buy an archtop and want to sound like George Benson and do bebop lines all the time.
You can keep to your own stuff, but if you have an urge to improve, you have this, this willingness to go, I want to get better. I want to sound better, I want to hear better. Jazz is probably the way to go, unless, of course, you go the other route. That's the classical route. And again, I just want to be sure I not sounding like a jazz purist and there are things that happen in not jazz that are really interesting, I mean, artistically.
And I mean with the lyrics and the showmanship it requires and the harmonies. Like there's a lot of really cool stuff, like a lot of it, but it's not. It's not because jazz is superior again. It's because it will have a larger frame of reference so that the study of it will will make any player basically encounter more of the complex rhythms, more of the complex harmonies, more certain traditions, the things we, we do in music that stemmed from jazz.
It's been really codified. So it's it's like learning a language. And I think it could be like language parallels again, but it's a it's a really, really good way to learn a musical alphabet, basically. Not this is just theory, not this is just playing standards. Not to say like you again, you need to do the Freddie Green and get an art shop are trying to sound like this.
I dunno, none of none of that. Hey guys, real quick, if you were enjoying this episode so far and you're interested in taking your or playing to the next level, please reach out to us. We've helped thousands of guitarists improvise on standards at a level they didn't even think was possible. So Lincoln Description or visit Jazz guitar lessons.
Darknet to start today. Okay, back to the episode. So speaking of process on the page at jazz guitar lessons and Slash process, there is seven basic steps. I have sort of move the needle on that process a bit by working with hundreds more students in the past both three years and I summarize at the five steps. So there's really no excuse.
And the process is to discover standards and to put them in your own repertoire list. It's a no brainer. It's segmented, it's simple, not easy. Again, the steps are clearly laid out. It's can't be explained any simpler and any further than this. It's simple, not easy. Right? And the easy is the shedding of the understanding what's happening. So what's a simple process?
Stage one looking only at staple voicings. Look it up. It's solely for free. It's on the Jester fellowship. You can download this. It's on two sheets of paper. There are chords, major, minor dominants, and the other ones in major minor dominants and the other ones with root on a six string and root on a five string guitar. The ones that are the most handy for jazz if you're not playing, you know, bar minor chords anymore, you're not playing the basic sevens.
You start with 9 to 13, it's all there. I call them the staple. So step one through any tune, any tune that you choose, of course you will do Autumn Leaves first because it's a rite of passage, and then you'll do probably summertime, stuff like that. All the things you are still based on. I've read the classic ones for education.
Then you put these staples over the form of the song out of time rubato, strum the chord ones or the next one, next one, next one. Make sure there's a big, big sound and everything's clear and you're golden. That's it. That's step one. Step two, I call the conveyor belt. So ensuring that I can play these voicings over the time that passes by one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two.
Or if it's a waltz. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three, whatever. Right. So that I can stick to the form. I love to use backing tracks for that matter. Often I use a I real pro. It's pretty. It's pretty pretty straightforward. Sorry, noisy car passing by. So after I can have the chord voicings, one chords, chord cymbal and I can perform them in time.
Then the third step and yeah, it's funny comes in third right, is to look at the melody and be able to play it and also do a mini arrangement or mini version of it. I hesitate to call it chord melody because people think like Joe Bass chord melody, but no, it can be done as what we call a thin chord melody.
There's a video interview with Bill Frisell, which I recommend you find, where he talks about holding the melody down and says, You know, basically I just do the melody and then I do whatever I can outside of the melody, which may mean I wind up with really strange fingerings for chords, but I don't play a chord for every melody note.
I don't try to be Joe Bass. That that's that's Bill Frisell speaking. Wow. And then I had the same with an interview with John Scofield, said the same thing, sort of played a melody. You make sure it's there and then tinker around to do what's possible to accompany it. Right. So that's your third step. So, so far, you're able to accompany out of time with the staple voicings.
Terrible to take this to the conveyor belt with the staple voicings. And in the third step, you're able to play your song so people would recognize it's like, All right, you're playing Autumn Leaves, You're not doing a naked single string version. You're doing sort of a single string with some chords underneath. By the way, there's 50 of those arrangements free on the chest, our fellowship link and description and they're there in the vault are called The Standard Essentials are all fully arranged.
They're all in sound slice. Some of them are more challenging than others. But go take a look. It's for you guys. Logins totally free. So after your third step and the fourth step, you will make the changes. And there's several crucial approaches to make the changes. But at least you can avoid running a bunch of scales and arpeggios for no reason at that stage and just focus on target notes in in crucial terms.
The first target note you should do is a third degree. So it's a C major or did you see the E that's your target and you're done. There are several ramifications, several methods for doing that. Again, see the content on the on the blog and website and the fellowship. It it's important to do it really well so that we can hear the changes and this sort of impro informs or improvization.
And then step five, simply wrap it up. Jam in a jam session setting with other musicians or again using my jam session tracks or I real or any YouTube jam session jam track you have would have been some accompaniment, some form of the melody and some improv, and then you're golden. Make sure you stick to the form and that's it.
So that's five set process. I recommend people in my programs do on at least five, ten, preferably 15 songs even before considering the rest. So you see that to become a better player, it's if even if you're a rock or bluesman, it's pretty simple. Like it's it's not easy, but it's pretty simple. It's like, do these things. All these students do systematically the same things on each of the tunes.
So you hear the tempo here, two rhythms. You see chords pass by, you get to encounter two five ones all the time. You get to use your blues licks, You get to write like all of that accumulates. And even if you don't have the intention of becoming a jazz player, you can still use that, which is the topic of this podcast, which is why we learn jazz.
Why do we learn jazz? Well, we learn jazz for the benefits that this process gives us. But of course, if you were more intermediate and advanced, the next steps like six and seven are basically going deeper into comping. Sounds like an advanced way of copying these staples and of work on lines and flat lines and flat 13th and inversions and sharp lessons.
And whenever there is a method for that in step six, and then there's a method for going deeper with the improv with a single note solo in Step seven, which yes, we start to encounter two scales. We start to encounter the arpeggios. We do all that beautiful work, but again, we do it on the repertoire list that we built.
We simply use all the things you are in solo by Starlight and Summertime and Soul are, and I don't know Wayne Shorter tunes and whatever. We use that only as a lab to test out our ideas and skills. So it's sort of a in a way, it's a game of chess. I dislike comparing jazz guitar and learning of jazz to a game of chess because people try to memorize stuff, they try to memorize the openings and they try to do plug and play scales and go like, Look, I play the right skill in the right place.
Why does it sound good? It's like, Well, there's a whole method, there's a whole how to do that. And if you if you do that, how? Well, if you follow a process like the one I've outlined, you will get tremendous results. Like I have lived it to a point that coming back to that top top 40 gig felt like a breeze.
I'm here, I'm sitting at 28 years old and I do this for like 3 hours, sat with like with an entire interlude in the middle. And I'm like, Oh, shoot, I played like 18 rock tunes and I have like, memorized them all and I'm locking in with the drummer. I know all my parts. I know I took some solos, of course, and everything's flowing smoothly.
How come? Well, because I've done a bunch of jazz and I'm not playing jazz on the gig, but the skill set required to do jazz properly, quote unquote, or in an effortless being confident and in an okay fashion. It just fueled my skills as a general guitarist. So if that's your intention, again, head over to jazz classes. That was plenty of trainings, free stuff.
There's paid programs as well, which you can find out by looking at the description, but this is really a worthwhile endeavor to go, You know what? Instead of reading tabs and just trying to learning moms in solos or whatever you doing, just opening that, cracking the door to another realm, which is jazz, it has a tremendous positive impact.
On that note, I'll let you go. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Please remember to like subscribe to to get notified when there's new episodes. But also if you give a review like a five star review and you leave comments, it really helps the algorithm to rank me higher and also helps me know which kind of stuff you like to hear in the podcast.
On that note, I'll see you next time. All right. Enjoy the care.
