Hey guys, it's Marc from Jazz Guitar Lessons, and welcome to The Definitive Guide to sounding like a legit jazz guitarist without doing any of that pesky practicing and learning theory nonsense. By the end of the episode, you'll be able to fool friends, full family, and full fellow musicians into thinking you're an actual jazz guitarist and all it takes is maybe five ten minutes.
Step zero be sure to grab an arch top especially. It needs to be really expensive and put that jazz stank face on at any point. All right. Step one talk about tone a lot. You need that tone. Doesn't matter if you can't play Autumn leaves yet and don't know any voicings or lines. As long as your tone sounds like you might someday be a bebop player.
Overuse reverb. Add some chorus bonus points named Bill Frisell without any context. Step two play literally one chord shape, preferably a shell voicing, right? Then move it up and down the neck and act like you're doing harmonic substitutions. It should really be a shape that's that's foreign to the folk and rock and blues players. Yeah, yeah, man is jazz and just don't worry, it really clashes.
Just call it outside or you're playing very chromatically. And the best way to make this and fake it is to look very thoughtfully deliberate while you play it. Step three throw around big words. Mention tritone substitutions in every conversations you have with musicians, even drummers. Bonus point if you don't even know what it means, use phrases like yeah, it's really about inner voice leading man.
And I'm working on my upper structure triads. And oh yeah, it's, you know, it's a Coltrane matrix. Harm, I'm doing. No one will even question that. Step four. We're getting there, guys. Always solo first, if someone starts copying or playing chords immediately start to improvise. If they're soloing, you should also solo. That's how jazz works. You can throw in a lick.
You saw one time last week on Instagram and bend the note weirdly, and you can end your phrases with your eyes closed in a gentle nod, like it's meant something, right? Bonus point you can look someone very deliberately right in the eye with that, you know, uncomfortable eye contact just when you begin your phrases. So you show like you really mean it.
Step five looks the part. I should have put that at step one, actually. So you'll need a flat cap. You'll need dark clothing and a very mysterious vibe. You know, you you need that that that beard and perhaps glasses, even if you don't need them. And you should carry a real book everywhere, even if it's mostly just blank pages, or if you never actually learned any tune in the real book.
It's just it's a staple. Like you need that real book and make sure you bring a hollow body guitar, even to places where it doesn't relate. Go grab a coffee, grab that hollow body, go to a punk gig. You should definitely bring that hollow body. All right, so of course, none of this makes you a real jazz guitarist.
But hey, at least now you sound cool while faking it. Or you can just practice simple lines, work on your phrasing, build your jazz chops the old fashioned way like the rest of us. But hey, where's the fun in that? All right, guys, that's it for this podcast episode. It was all in good fun. This is a sort of a test.
Let me know if you have, questions. Please leave comments below. this is a full on parody of our beloved jazz world. One thing I should have mentioned is maybe we should have drop a name, drop Berkeley a lot, you know, or saying, oh, my. My teacher studied at Berklee. But honestly, if you're actually serious about learning jazz guitar, like, for real, for real, you can come and hang out with us at JazzGuitarLessons.net. We've got the tools, we've got the structure. We got none of that fake tritone talk unless it's funny. All right. So I'll see you there.
