Good jazz guitar advice for beginners can be hard to find.

The internet can be super helpful for learning jazz guitar – it’s easy to find great lessons and advice for beginners if you know where to look. Some of my favorite teachers have courses available through Truefire or My Music Masterclass.

(I don’t have any monetary interest in either of these sites… I just think they’re great.)

But there’s also a downside to getting jazz guitar advice on the internet. I’ve seen plenty of posts full of well-meaning but still terrible advice for beginners.

Overwhelming amounts of information, exercises that are likely way beyond the abilities and understanding of a beginner, and unrealistic ideas of what a beginning jazz guitar student can do.

Go to any facebook group, jazz guitar forum, or Reddit and you’ll find posts where someone asks for advice as a beginner.

And then they get answers like…

…here’s a 107 item list of things you should practice for 8 hours every day…

…buy these 75 books and you’re all set…

…don’t buy any books… learn everything by ear…

…just take lessons with a great teacher…

I believe most of this advice is well intentioned. Some of it may even come from actual teachers. But it’s still bad advice.

It’s overwhelming. It doesn’t take the abilities of the person asking for advice into account. And it doesn’t give them anything concrete to actually do to improve right now, today.

But I’ve found that a lot of times the people responding to these posts forget the person who actually asked the question…

…a beginner looking for where to start.

Instead, they spew out a whole bunch of stuff they’re interested in, currently working on or having their own students do right now… not exactly what a beginner needs to be doing.

Better jazz guitar advice for beginners is simple. And it has to be.

Because jazz is overwhelming to start with, so any “help” should be about simplifying the process, and giving you one thing to work on. Maybe 2 things, tops.

There will be plenty of time to complicate things later on, once you’ve got the basics under your fingers.

Jazz Guitar Advice for Beginners: 5 Tips

First, there is no set advice that’s right for everyone. That’s just how it goes.

The right advice for you depends on what you need to improve on first… and what youre actually interested in playing.

For example if you’re playing in a jazz band, you need to get your chords under control first. Hands down.

If that’s not your situation, then you have some more options, and it really depends on what you’re interested in. Usually people coming to me for lessons will want to start with either chords or scales and soloing.

I tend not to start people out right away with arpeggios because they’re a little more complicated to put to work right away. Chords and scales get you up and running faster. The extra details can come later.

Here are 5 general pieces of advice for beginners that is actually helpful as you start to learn jazz guitar:

Learn Your Chords

Most of the time, learning how to play your jazz guitar chords is going to be priority #1.

Are you in a jazz band? Or playing with other people in a weekly jam? Want to play solo guitar? You need a good chord vocabulary for anything you want to do with jazz guitar.

It’s also not that complicated if you do it right. You can get started with just 2 easy-to-learn chord shapes, and build your vocabulary from there.

Click here for my free lesson on easy jazz guitar chords.

Work On Soloing With Scales

Soloing in jazz gets kind of a bad rap for being “too complicated” compared to other styles.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Sure, there are generally a few more key changes than you’re used to if you come from playing other music styles. But there’s still not really that much you have to keep track of.

Maybe 2-3 different scales for most songs, at a basic level.

Keeping track of a couple of different scales isn’t that hard to do – and if you know all of your major scale patterns, you can change keys easily and quickly.

Check out my free lessons on jazz guitar scales, or buy the 5 Essential Major Scale Shapes for Jazz Guitar PDF download lesson. (Great for if you want something to print out, or keep on your device.)

Learn the Neck (or at least the notes you really need)

Learning the fretboard doesn’t have to be hard. You can get away with just the 5th and 6th strings to start.

These are the strings you’re probably used to if you’ve been playing for a while already, so it won’t be that different from what you’re already doing.

And even if you’ve never thought about it before, learning the notes on the 6th and 5th strings won’t take you too long.

If you’re in a time crunch, you don’t even need to learn where every note is… you can start with just the notes you need the most often to play the chords in your songs.

The rest of the notes will come with time and practice.

There’s no need to make a heroic effort to learn all of the notes everywhere on the neck – just chip away at it over time and you’ll get there pretty quick.

Check out my free lesson on learning the notes on the neck here.

Play With People If You Can

If at all possible, spend some time playing with other people. It doesn’t have to be something formal like a jam session… it can just be a few people in your living room.

It could be taking lessons, playing with another guitar player friend who is also working on jazz, or finding a community jazz band to join.

You can learn a lot about playing music just by sitting down with other people and playing for a while. And you’ll learn things you won’t get from practicing in your room.

Keep Learning, Keep Going

The great thing about jazz guitar is that there is always more to learn. You can always pick up on new songs, chord shapes, or soloing ideas from different people.

It’s easy to grab a lesson, book or course and get a new approach to playing.

Some good options I have available here are:

You can also check out my growing library of free jazz guitar lessons on chords, scales, arpeggios, and music theory right here at Jazz Guitar Guide. Just use the menu at the top of the page.

I’ll always give away 99% of my best stuff for free, right here.

But if you want something that takes you more step-by-step through the process, my eBooks and “Quick and Dirty” lesson downloads are the way to go.

Conclusion

Beginner jazz guitar players get a lot of advice thrown their way, and a lot of it is just the worst.

Even when you’re already pretty good from another style of playing, jazz can feel pretty overwhelming. So it’s important to keep things simple to start with.

Focus on what you need to work on the most at first (it’s probably chords).

And from there it’s pretty simple:

Keep going
Add the tools you need, as you need them

Remember: you can only really learn or improve on one thing at a time. So don’t get hung up on the laundry list some guy on reddit said you should be working on.

Instead, pick one thing to work on today, and get to it. Once that’s easy, pick something else and get going again.

What are you working on right now? Let me know in the comments.