The following is a video excerpt from the popular home study course Gibson’s Learn and Master Guitar with Steve Krenz, sold through Legacy Learning Systems. This is an advanced jazz guitar lesson, a full chapter from the course called “Jazzing up your Chord Progressions”. Speaking of the course, if you are not familiar with it as of yet, follow this link to read my review on Gibson’s Learn & Master Guitar. I am a proud owner of this course and highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn how to play guitar from the comfort of their own home.
Back to this lesson….
In this lesson, Steve discusses a few different ways to make your basic chord progressions more jazzy.
For instance, he talks about how you can add what is referred to as “color tones” to your basic chords to make a more complex jazz chord. For instance, the C major chord is a pretty basic chord comprised of the notes C, E and G (1,3 and 5 positions of the C Major Scale). When you play it, it doesn’t sound very jazzy does it? Go ahead and add the B note (7th position of the C Major Scale) to this chord, giving you a Cmaj7 chord and now you are beginning to have that Jazz feel.
Of course when you start adding these colors to your basic chords, things are going to become a bit more challenging, so if you haven’t been playing for very long, you may find this a little difficult.
He discusses a couple of other techniques in this video like Adding the ii-V Progression and How to Dress up the Dominant Seventh Chord.
I don’t want to spoil all of the fun so watch the free video lesson below to learn more…
Leave a Reply