All right. Welcome to the podcast. In this episode, I want to cover why jazz guitar is not as complicated as it seems and where to get started. So let's get going.
Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists to 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 French accent, make sure to subscribe.
Jazz and jazz guitar in general. And there's this this fallacy or this aura of mysticism around the harmonies like the ninth chords.
And if you're a blues player or a rocker girl, what's that 13 thing? And there's this thing about the scales and the superpositions and the whole, sax player playing really, really fast. Clarissa's notes. So we can just all calm down, take a chill pill, and today I'll expose how to get started with three simple ideas or materials, and I'll tell you right away it's major, minor, dominant frame that, write it down, put it where you can see it, major, minor and dominant.
So with that information that you probably have already, if you're guitar player, you're playing pop songs and rock solid rock songs and folk songs. Yeah, I try to say folk and rock at the same time. It said rock. We're not playing baroque music. the whole point with major, minor and dominance that it's already present in everything we do.
If you're already playing, if you already know music, you're familiar with these three things, these three elements of material. Jazz is the same thing. So I would suggest I will do some theory in this podcast, but I'll suggest that. So you pick up your guitar and you learn these very simple staple voicings. You can get them for free on the Jazz Guitar Fellowship.
It's a school group. There's over, 3500 people right now on it. So the whole point is this with root six, so on your E string and root five chords, we have three kinds of staples major, minor and dominance. If it's for a C major, you can expect of course to have the keynote, the E and the G for a C major chord.
That would be a basic boring cowboy chord triad, which we do in jazz. It will either have a seventh or a ninth or a sixth, sometimes all three, or sometimes I would say both the ninth and the sixth. That's very common. Or the ninth and the seventh. So regardless of these color tones, we can still boil it down and look at a cord and go, oh, it's a C major.
It's a C major. Yes. But market has this fancy, C major six nine. Yeah, it's still C major, right. So if you have a C major chord grips that you can take say around the third fret that has a C root on the fifth string, your set and then do the same with the C root on the sixth string, which is around the eighth fret.
It's a red six string. Right. And you in that case, you leave out the the bass the A note. So you get a chord that either has fifth, fourth, third and second. So five, four, three and two as far as your string numbers. And you get another one that has six, four, three and two. Those are two basic staples, right.
So after you got those down and the specifics don't really matter, but the puts that you got a major chord. What you got to do to that to get a minor chord is to get a flat three or an E-flat. So if they were a C minor triad, you'll see E-flat and G, and there's your minor chord. You've heard countless songs that are written in minor.
Sometimes songs are not in the minor key, but they contain a minor chord. For instance, if you're in the key of C major, you may encounter an A minor chord or an E minor chord, or D minor chord, right? So I'll stick to a C root because it's easier to explain. Same process with your staples. Grab the C that's fifth string, third fret, and a C that's a treat.
Sixth string. And make sure you have an E-flat in there. And make sure you have a B-flat. So the third and the seventh are lowered. All right. And if you guys are more familiar with the theory we start back with the C major scale. Go KDF grab. Some of you guys understand you can do CEG and B you get a C major seven chord.
Although in my staple voicings there's no pure C major seven. There's reasons for that that are, more technical and more, esthetics and sonic like I prefer chords that don't have the seventh in major case. but that's, that's the preferred the to time with the minor one. I would do city of G a b again, but I would have both the E-flat and the B-flat.
So that means you have the third and the seventh. If you've been in the jazz circles for any length of time to teachers, instructors like me, like to harp on the fact that you need to target third and seven notes for the guidelines. And it's right. If you build your staples correctly with your C minor chord, you will wind up looking at the third and seventh on your DNG string when you do it with the root on the sixth string there.
Somewhere here you can't see it on camera because I'm in the podcast, but there's somewhere, on the eighth fret as well, to be fun and E-flat. And if you go to the other one with the root on the fifth string, you wind up with the E-flat and B-flat reversed. So instead of DNG, they're on G and D, right?
That's the beauty of the system. With staples, you need two locations, right? So we have a major chord. We have a minor chord. So far so good. What's the minor one? F sorry. What's the dominant one? Major and minor. Check check. Dominant is halfway. So the dominant chord for a C will have the note C, E and G.
So you already see it's major sounding but it has a B-flat. So it has a flat seven right. So that would be what we call a C7 chord. Same deal with the major one I told you C major, nine C6 and whatever with the minor could be C minor seven could be C minor, 11 C minor, nine CB.
It could be any of these extensions with the dominant chord. It's the same thing, although there's no, quality quality to it that is major or minor. It just says number. For instance, C seven is a dominant chord, C nine is a dominant chord. It's neither major nor minor. It's somewhere between C 13 is another good example.
if you've played the Hendrix song, of course, Purple Haze E seven sharp nine. So it's a dominant because it's E7 doesn't say major or minor. And then sharp nine is what we call an alteration. It's altered. Right. So now we have three chord qualities. I can't really do it on the podcast, but I highly highly encourage encourage you to do a quick Google search for staple voicings.
Jazz Guitar Fellowship. You can find it for free. It's a two pager. You get major minor dominants. Plus you'll have a bonus category of chords that's called the others like minor seven, flat five, diminished seven like the ones that don't fit, that don't quite fit. So here's why. Jazz guitar is not complicated as it seems with these three voicings.
I talked about, you could perform probably 80, maybe more 80%, 90% of the chord progressions in jazz standards. Of course, I'm not talking about fusion jazz, free, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, crazy stuff. I'm not talking about that. But the traditional Fly Me to the moon, all the Things you are, Stella by Starlight, you will get away with those basic chords.
And same thing with the improvization. So you come up and you can play the melody, you can accompany like, oh wow, that's a if you will, which we're doing is the folklore of jazz. Like those are the very basic chords we can use. Of course, you can have more complex chords on top of that, but that's still the baseline.
And melodically, when you're improvising, you can stick to the same principles and you can go nuts and do like modal tunes and and really play linearly on a single scale. I recommend you take what I call my step for my stage four, which is the bullseye method, where you can target certain specific notes and the chord, while improvising is much easier.
It sounds way better, but at first, from the get go, you will want to do a job of plug and play in terms of the, the chord, the, the correct scales that go along with the chord. For instance, the song goes C minor seven. What should I play? So that's where the magic of jazz is not that complicated kicks in ready if it's a major chord, played a major scale C, C major seven C major something CDF gab it's just a scale, it's a scale.
All the white notes on the keyboard. Easy, right? If it's a dominant chord. So it says C7 or C nine or C13 or if you're playing the blues and C you can play that same scale with one caveat. You play a flat seven. So CD, F, g a, B flat, that's it. And now if you have a chord that's minor, you do both the B-flat and the E-flat.
So CD, E-flat figure B-flat, C that's minor. People call this the Dorian mode. You don't need to know modes and whatever to get into that thing. But the whole spirit of this is you start with a bland C major scale. You do one thing to it, which is flat seven, and then you do two things to it, which is flat seven, flat three.
And if you've been observing this, you're like, oh, it's the same order as a cycle of fourths. Yes it is. So from C major you go to F major with a B flat. This is what we did to the scale. And then you do another flat with the key of B flat. So B flat and E flat and so on and so forth.
There are more colors or other degrees of discernment where you can be way more fancy with this. But that's, that's really the bigger picture. So people will say, well, jazz complicated because it all it's got all these things. I say, well, it's founded on very few basic things because if it was too many colors, too many things, we wouldn't be able to play or discern or hear it, which we have when we hear the more complex, writing like Pat Metheny tunes is that we still have, specifications or modifications of this basic harmony.
Is this a major sounds, this a minor sound, or is this a dominant sound? Is this right? B because beyond that you could say, well, that was a dominant chord and it had a flat five, but it's still a dominant sound with the flat five. It gives a specific flavor. But yeah. Here's the example. Candy a sports candy.
I forgot what the name is. My my son, my four year old son is very fond of him. and there are blue ones, red ones and green ones and, probably like blue raspberry and whatever. I didn't even taste the candies yet. I don't do candies, but the point is like, it's still candy, right? So sugar is so sweet.
So if I look at it at a song, I'm like, oh, this is Candy. It's a minor 11th chord. Oh, it's got this specific flavor. So it's one of those candies that's blue flavor, whatever that flavor is. So it's it's harmony, and jazz is built upon these things. Like I would think about it like salt and sugar and maybe, bitterness.
Right? Is it salty? Is it sugary sweet or is it bitter? And then. But how bitter is it a lot bitter. It's just a little bit. Is it sweet mixed in with some salt. Right. That's the thing. But at the foundation of that there's really only a few core elements. And that is why jazz guitar is not as complicated as it seems.
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please like and subscribe. Of course. Leave me a comment if you're watching this on YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform like Spotify, and I will see you soon on the website. Jazz guitar lessons dot net. Improve your jazz. Stop playing with a real teacher. Thank you. Take care.
