JazzGuitarLessons.Net, Improve your jazz guitar playing with a real teacher podcast on using studies and entire pieces instead of bits and pieces from everywhere. 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 French accent, make sure to subscribe.
Hey. All right, so another micro podcast where instead of blabbering for like 20 minutes, I realize that people prefer when I just have short advice and interesting topics to cover. So this one's pretty interesting. Think about this as jazz guitarists or as jazz musicians in general. You know what we tend to do? We tend to learn bits and pieces.
We tend to kind of play a standard, and every time we play it, we don't play the same way. Of course it's jazz. You don't come up in exactly the same way. You don't solo in exactly the same way. Even the melody, you know the main theme of the song, you don't play it in the exact same fashion, which is added as it should be.
But here's something that might be overlooked in the process. We don't learn pieces of music. We don't learn. And by pieces I mean either study or whole written, parts of music that you do as your rock guitarist. You take up a piece and you kind of learn it, you know, whether it be Bon Jovi or whatever, you pick it up and you can learn it as it is.
I want to play this while in jazz. We're like, no, no, no, we're above that. We're just going to look at the scales and arpeggios and make up our own stuff. And guess what? It doesn't always work. And that's probably why we evolved. And I mean, I'm including myself in that guitar. We all suffer through playing kind of bad music.
You listen to a trio that has never played together. They play jazz. Sometimes can be like, whoops, this one that dropped the ball on this one, the tempos all over the place. We don't really know where we are, you know? You know the drill. You're probably a jazz musician as you're listening to this. So here's my advice. And we're see, we're just at the two minute mark now.
So I still have a little bit of time learn entire pieces, prepared pieces of music, whether it be classical pieces. Although, classical guitar is just another world. It's great for your picking hand if you want to work on that for fingerstyle, but if you don't, there's plenty of pieces that you can take up with her, whether they're single note, whether it be, say, transcribing a solo and playing it exactly as it is, which is probably the best jazz learning tool ever, by the way.
or you can also use books that have written pieces, say, a modern method for guitar. It has pieces written out, and what it gives you is the chance to take out, take out the doubt, take out this uncertainty in the equation when it comes to note choices like now, the notes and the chords are all the been selected by the author.
For me, all I have to do is make pretty music with that. Now you can think of performance, you can think of your dynamics, you can think of your tempo, of the weight, of the feel of your swing or not swing. You can think of the way you hold the guitar. You can think of the way you strum those cards.
You can think of so many things that in the heat of improvisation, in the heat of the moment, you don't have time to think about that. So that's my advice for you today. Pick up the pieces. case in point, modern method for guitar. It's great if you want to learn how to read. If you already know how to read, I recommend, Barry Galbraith.
jazz Guitar study series is on old publishing. It's great. It's, 5 or 6 books in the series. My favorite book is volume three, which is all carbon CDs. So think about that. You go ahead and you get studies. They're all written. It's not just a bunch of chords. Well, actually it is, but it's a bunch of chords notated in rhythms.
So it's like this jazz guitar master is copying for you and it's all written out. So all you have to do is learn it as it is, not just the chord voicings, but also the rhythms in which you would be comping behind a soloist, which is pretty interesting because if you practice these pieces, you integrate so much more than just the voicings.
You integrate the rhythms, the feel of it, you integrate the dynamics, you know, you integrate so many things. So that's my advice for today. Maybe take a little bit of your practice time and have things that are pre-written, prefabricated as part of your daily practice. All right. I'll let you go. My name is Marc from Jazz Guitar lessons dot net improve your jazz guitar playing with a real teacher and I'll see you in the next podcast.
Take care.
