Jazz guitar for beginners

Getting started

What you need

• A guitar. Any guitar works: acoustic, classical or electric. If it’s electric, use the neck pickup, turn the tone knob down a little and keep the amp clean, with no distortion. That’s most of the jazz sound.
• A pick (plectrum), medium or heavy. Fingers are fine too, especially for the bossa nova.
• Fifteen minutes a day. Little and often beats one long session a week.

Tune up

Standard tuning, from the thickest string to the thinnest: E A D G B E. A clip-on tuner or a tuning app is easiest. Or tune by ear to these notes, made by the same guitar sound as the tunes:

How to read the music on these pages

Each tune is printed three ways at once:

• Chord symbols above the staff (C, G7, Am7) tell you which chord to strum from that point until the next symbol.
• The staff shows the rhythm: how long each note lasts. Guitar music is written an octave higher than the guitar sounds, so it fits on the treble clef; that’s normal, and true of every guitar book.
• The TAB underneath shows where to play each note. The six lines are the strings, high E on top (the way you look down at the guitar), and the number is the fret. 0 means the open string.

The chord boxes are pictures of the neck standing up, thickest string on the left. Dots are fingers (1 = index, 4 = little finger), ○ means play the string open, × means leave it out.

Your first jazz chords

Jazz uses seventh chords: a plain chord with one more note on top, which gives that rich, unfinished sound. These six open shapes turn up again and again in the ten tunes. Learn C and G7 first: they’re all of tune 1.

A fifteen-minute practice plan

1. Three minutes: change chords. Pick two chords from the tune and switch between them, four slow strums each, without stopping. Stopping is the habit to break.
2. Four minutes: comp. Press Tune only and strum the chords while the page plays the tune: one short down-strum on every beat. Jazz players call this comping (from accompanying).
3. Four minutes: the tune. Press Chords only and Slower, and play the tune from the TAB over the strumming, a line at a time.
4. Four minutes: make something up. Turn on Loop with Chords only, and play anything you like using the notes of the tune. Simple, with gaps, is good. This is how improvising starts.

Using the play-along

On every tune: Play counts you in with one bar of clicks; Tune only and Chords only drop a part so you can play it; Slower plays at 70% of the speed; Loop goes round again; and you can click any note to start from there. The guitar sound is made on the page, so it works offline once loaded, and Print gives you a clean copy for the music stand.

Listen to the masters

Half of learning jazz is listening. Five guitarists to start with:

• Django Reinhardt (1910–1953), who led the Quintette du Hot Club de France in Paris from 1934, playing his solos with two fretting fingers after a fire injured his left hand.
• Charlie Christian (1916–1942), whose playing with Benny Goodman from 1939 turned the electric guitar into a solo voice in jazz.
• Freddie Green (1911–1987), the rhythm guitarist in Count Basie’s band for nearly fifty years, and the master of four-to-the-bar comping.
• Wes Montgomery (1923–1968), who played with his thumb instead of a pick and made melodies in octaves his signature.
• Kenny Burrell, whose album Midnight Blue (1963) is a lesson in playing the blues with jazz chords.

Next

When a tune feels easy, read the matching section of the jazz guitar theory page: swing, seventh chords, shell voicings, the 12-bar blues, the ii–V–I and the scales for your first solos, each with a button to hear it.

Questions and answers