Here’s one thing I know for sure: If I could learn how to play jazz guitar, anyone can.
While I had a certain amount of aptitude for playing guitar in general, jazz guitar did not come naturally to me.
But with the right approach and a little luck, I found myself on the right path. I developed some really important skills almost without knowing it at the time, and found a love for jazz guitar along the way.
In this guide, I’ll share the core practice strategies that helped my own playing. You’ll find out about the essential skills you need to learn. I’ll give you some simple guidelines on what to do and when.
And maybe most importantly, I’ll show you how to keep improving your jazz guitar playing over time.
How I Learned to Play Jazz Guitar
I didn’t get started learning how to play jazz guitar because of a deep love of jazz, or a desire to express myself creatively, or anything like that. It wasn’t even to impress girls.
(As a side note – if jazz guitar is your strategy for impressing someone you like… you probably want to rethink that strategy)
One day, I just found out there was a class in school where I could play guitar. I liked playing guitar, so I joined the jazz band. That’s all there was to it.
In my first rehearsal, I was immediately overwhelmed by what I saw on the page:
- Chords I didn’t even know existed – Eb9? Never heard of it.
- The band director wasn’t much help – they wanted to help, but just didn’t know the guitar.
- My guitar teacher wasn’t great either – he just showed me some chord shapes that kind of worked and let me squeak by in jazz band
But I got lucky – I found a great teacher who was kind of a local legend. And an amazing jazz guitar player.
He took me through his methodical approach and really showed me how to play jazz guitar. My new teacher had no interest in just showing me random chord shapes to survive the songs in my jazz band.
Instead, he wanted to give me the tools to never have to practice chords for jazz band again.
Really Learning How to Play Jazz Guitar
I followed his exercises and advice – and from there, I just took off. Before long, I was hooked on jazz guitar, and it became an obsession.
I learned everything I could about chords and soloing – from my teacher and from any book on jazz guitar I could find.
Eventually went to school for jazz, and got a couple of degrees. Now I get to spend my work days teaching people how to play jazz guitar. Not too shabby.
I wrote this guide to be a sort of roadmap for you as you learn how to play jazz guitar. The ideas and skills in here are some of the things that helped me – and I hope they can help you too.
How to Play Jazz Guitar – Core Practice Philosophies
Build the Mechanics First
It’s tempting to think too hard about jazz guitar.
Especially since it’s usually seen as a “complicated” or “sophisticated” style of music. Something about it makes us want to turn jazz guitar into an academic exercise. Memorizing formulas, patterns and names of the modes all seem like important things to do.
But here’s something important I learned from my first teacher (and then forgot for a decade or so, and had to remember):
Jazz guitar is a physical skill that anyone can learn.
It’s about building mechanics and putting them to work for you in the music. And then kind of a funny thing happens.
When you know the right thing to do and it’s in your fingers… you’ll be able to do it. You just have to train your hands and your ears to do what you want them to do.
No matter what you are trying to do with jazz guitar, everything can be broken down into 3 basic skills:
Sometimes these things blend together. A line in a solo could be some arpeggio patterns and some scales.
Chord melodies and solo guitar performances combine all 3 elements together at once. Comping passages sometimes have scale elements to them.
But even when things overlap, you can still learn to recognize when each of these skills are being used. And when you can recognize this, life as a jazz guitarist gets easier.
Cycle Your Practice
You can’t learn everything at once. It’s just how it works.
Something I heard years ago that I’ve found to be true over and over again is this:
You can really only improve at one thing at a time.
In the times where I’ve tried to work on a little bit of everything at once, I made very little progress. My brain was just stretched in too many different directions. I couldn’t make any meaningful progress on any of it.
But when I learned to put all of my focus into just one thing for a while (2-3 weeks works well for me, typically), I started getting a lot better.
So you can only really improve at one thing at a time. But rather than get discouraged by this, we should lean into it.
The Skill Cycling Approach to Learning How to Play Jazz Guitar
I’ve adopted a “skill cycling” approach to my own practice, and my work with students. And It works great.That’s because when you focus only on one skill for a while, you get a lot better at it.
Maybe spend 2 weeks just working on your major scales. Or a month on drop 3 chords.
You’ll get pretty good at that one skill. And then you can move on to the next one for a while. Eventually when you come back to the first thing you did, you’ll have a much better handle on it than you might expect.
If You Don’t Use It… Do You Lose It?
This is kind of a scary approach to adopt. Even when I knew I should be doing this, I resisted it. I was afraid I’d end up losing progress on everything else I needed to do.
And it seems like this fear is pretty common. Most people I talk to are worried that if they don’t review something every day they’ll lose it.
But in my experience these days, it just isn’t true.
Let’s say you work really hard on major scales for a couple of weeks. And then move on to other skills…
… and maybe you don’t come back to the scales for a month or so.
Will your major scales be just as good when you come back to them? Probably not (although it has happened that way for a couple of students of mine).
But they’ll come back a lot faster than you think. You just have to knock a little bit of rust off for a day or two, and you’re back in business.
Here’s something interesting I’ve found: most of your learning doesn’t happen when you’re first practicing a skill. It happens when you’re reviewing, and trying to remember it
And when you’re fixing little problems that come up as you try to remember.
Learning how to play jazz guitar isn’t about having an encyclopedia of scales or chords in your head at all times. It’s about getting faster at remembering and figuring things out over time.
There are some smart ways of reviewing skills in the background as you work hard in improving in one area, and we’ll look at that next.
How to Play Jazz Guitar – Songs Are Your Guide
Don’t be the jazz guitar player who learns all about how to play jazz guitar, but doesn’t know any songs. (that was me!)
It’s easy to get caught up in skills, licks, theories, and everything else there is to do with jazz guitar. I know I spent tons of time playing scale exercises and working on different improvisation techniques… but very little time learning songs.
But songs are maybe the most important part of learning how to play jazz guitar. In reality, songs are why we work on everything else in the first place. So if you’re not playing any songs, you’re kind of missing the point.
You want to be able to play something at the end of the day – so take the time to learn some songs. They don’t need to be learned by ear or memorized or anything like that – it’s fine to read them out of the real book.
But it’s important to be able to play a few.
Plus, songs are a great way to keep up the skills you aren’t actively working on right now.
The melodies to songs are going to come from your scale patterns – so it’s an easy way to keep your scales good when you’re working hard on improving your chords or arpeggios.
The chord progressions are obviously great ways to keep your chord shapes solid when you’re getting better at your scales.
Playing solos over tunes can be a way to work on just about anything – scales to play melodically, arpeggios to outline chords, and chord shapes to work on comping for yourself.
If you think about it, jazz standards are your best practice tool you have. They’re fun to play, and a great way to keep all of your skills sharp.
So use them.
Pure Dumb Repetitions
Any skill you’ve ever learned was built on repetitions. Whether it’s tying your shoes, or playing your super locrian mode over a dominant 7th chord.
Every sport I ever played growing up – baseball, basketball, golf, martial arts, all were built on repetitions of basic skills.
I remember going to a summer baseball camp and everyone spent time going over each step in the process of throwing a ball. Pausing at every sticking point to check our arm angles. Making sure every little detail was just right.
Some of the guys at this camp had been playing baseball for 6 or more years. And they still spent an hour each camp day going ofer repetitions of this basic skill.
Jazz guitar is no different.
You need to play a scale shape a certain number of times before it becomes second nature to you.
Tricky chord progressions are going to need a lot of repetition before you figure out the right way for you to get through them.
I remember once I spent a half hour just playing through the melody to “Beautiful Love” on repeat. So I could really get a feel for how the tune went.
And when you put in serious reps like that, you learn things that would be really hard for any teacher to point out to you. You get to observe things and get the little details to “click” into place.
So embrace repetitions in your jazz guitar practice. For basic skills when you’re just starting out, I recommend 10 or more repetitions. Over a few days this will really help those finger patterns to sink in.
The more serious you are about learning how to play jazz guitar, the more reps you will do.
Play All Over the Neck
One of the more heretical things I tell my students is this:
I don’t care about keys. And you don’t need to be thinking about them either.
Disclaimer: keys are an important part of playing music, and eventually you do need to be conscious about it.
But I’d argue that for guitar, what key you are in is not a helpful piece of trivia when you’re developing your mechanics.
When you’re working on the mechanics of any skill, what key you are playing in really doesn’t matter. You just don’t need to be thinking that hard.
And thinking about what key you are in takes your attention away from what your fingers should be doing. So you’ll actually make more mistakes.
You need to understand that the guitar is a pattern based instrument – so learn the finger patterns, and let them do their jobs. Muscle memory will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you later on – if you let it.
So what should you think about instead of keys? Here’s what I have my students do: play your scales, arpeggios, chords, etc at every fret that makes sense.
It’s important to get used to the different fret spacings, sounds, and how your fingers look at different areas of the neck.
The easiest way to do this: play the scale, move up a fret, and do it again.
The big grain of salt: By following this advice, you do end up playing in all 12 keys. The important difference here is that you’re not thinking about it.
Your focus is on the basic mechanics of the skill, and nothing else. Follow this process and you’ll learn all of your basic skills much faster.
You Have to Start Somewhere
Ok so you should cycle your practice, use songs, practice all over the neck, that’s all fine.
But what should you do first?
I mean – it’s going to take some time until you’ve built up a cycle of chords, scales, and arpeggios to work through.
Honestly, it could take a couple of months if you’re really spending a few weeks per topic. But after that you’ll have a nice cycle you can work through so you never get stuck, and keep having interesting things to work on.
For most people it makes the most sense to start with one of these two things: chords or scales.
Arpeggios can take a little bit of a back seat for now. Here’s why:
- Chords are usually the most important job of a jazz guitar player. If you’re in any kind of performing group, you’ll be playing lots of chords. So they’re usually the most urgent issue for us
- Scales are the fastest way for you to start playing solos and sounding good. Most of our melodies come directly from scales – so they’re a safe bet for you if you’re trying to improvise solos.
- Arpeggios are best used as a technical exercise at first. They have a little longer learning curve before they actually become useful – there are just more moving parts. Do practice them, because they’re super helpful once you have them under your fingers. They just take a little longer to really learn.
So pick either your scales or chords, depending on what you want to be working on or need to do.
Spend a few weeks working on the simplest scales or chords you can’t do yet, and then move on to the next thing.
That’s all you need to do in order to start cycling your practice.
How to Play Jazz Guitar: Basic Skills
The 3 basic skills you need to be developing are your chords, scales, and arpeggios.
These are the guitar specific skills you’ll need when you’re learning how to play jazz guitar – or any other style of music for that matter.
These 3 skills are the finger patterns you need to learn the mechanics of. They’re the fundamentals that make it possible for you to apply more advanced theory concepts down the road.
And most importantly, they’re the skills that make your life much easier when you start to understand them from a guitarist point of view.
There are other musical skills that definitely play a part – but I think they’re over-sold to beginners.
Ear training, music theory, rhythm, and improvisation skills are important – I won’t deny that for a second.
But I would argue that they can be learned as a part of learning your basic guitar skills. Instead of as something separate.
For now, you’re better off focusing on developing the mechanics of your 3 basic skills below first, and then seeing where other, more intellectual topics overlap with what you can already do.
Chords
For most jazz guitarists, jazz guitar chords are the single most important skill to have. Especially at first.
If you’re playing in a group, you need to know your chords. And if you want to play solo guitar and chord melody, you need to know a lot of chords.
There’s just no escaping it – these things are important.
Given a choice between working on chords or scales first, about 90% of my new jazz guitar students go for learning chords first.
And before you get overwhelmed… it’s not that hard. You don’t need to know a bunch of music theory or study different voicings, or anything like that.
The guitar is a pattern based instrument. Which means chords are still finger shapes – just like your basic open C, G, D, and Em chords.
They just sound different, and they’re movable – like barre chords you might know already.
You don’t have to get a degree in music theory to play all the jazz guitar chords you need.
Try this instead: start with a couple of simple chord shapes and build from there.
Shell Voicings for Jazz Guitar
Shell voicings for jazz guitar are simple, 3 note patterns that are:
- Easy to learn
- Sound good
- Easy to play
And while they’re great for beginners, I still use these shapes every day. They give a nice, clean impression of the chord – without anything extra or distracting.
I’ll usually use them if I need to grab chords really fast, or if it’s my first time playing through a tune.
And while shell voicings are great, I’ve even simplified it further with 2 Easy Jazz Guitar Chords You Should Know.
With this lesson I’ve reduced the shell voicings into just 2 shapes that fit together seamlessly in your chord progressions.
This makes you sound good, and sets the stage for more advanced playing down the road.
Check out the basics of these chords below:
Easy Jazz Guitar Chords: 6th String Shapes
Easy Jazz Guitar Chords: 5th String Shapes
In college and grad school, I created a whole system of chord playing around these 2 chord shapes.
You could build yourself a nice little career playing in jazz groups using only these two chord shapes and modifications to them.
I would know -I used these to a fault in my early playing career.
They just work, and they sound great. So get them under your fingers.
Want To Learn How To Play More Jazz Guitar Chords?
If you’re ready for more, or want a bigger sound, check out these 5 Movable Chord Shapes for Jazz Guitar.
These chord shapes have been used by jazz guitarists forever. In this guide, I’m sharing the set of shapes I learned from my very first jazz guitar teacher.
The idea is that it gives you quick access to any chord you need – within 1 or 2 frets of the chord you just played. If you’re reading chord charts in a big band, this is an invaluable skill to have.
The less you have to move to get to your next chord, the faster you will be.
And if you’re playing solo guitar, this is the foundation of a great chord vocabulary that will help you get the sounds inside your head to come out of your guitar.
Major 7 Chords
Dominant 7 Chords
Minor 7 Chords
Minor 7b5 Chords
To really learn these chords, try putting them to work in songs you’re already playing. If you need to find some songs to play, the real book is a good resource, as well as the iRealPro app.
You can also find tons of chord progressions for free at Learn Jazz Standards.
Scales
To me, learning your jazz guitar scales is kind of the fun part. I love working on my scale patterns and building up my skills.
Getting better at your scale patterns means you have more ability to play good solos. With scales, you get more creative options for solos and melodies.
You also unlock new technical abilities for yourself.
And much like chords, all of our scales follow repeatable finger patterns. There are just a few more moving pieces to work with.
For any type of scale, there are 5 common finger patterns for the guitar. There are more possibilities, but I’ve found it’s better to keep things as simple as possible – these 5 shapes will cover all the bases you need.
And once you’ve got a finger pattern down, it’s yours! You don’t really have to think about it too hard. You just have to follow the pattern.
Jazz Guitar Scales: Your Main Source of Melodies
Here’s why this is important: scales are where all of our melodies come from.
I spent countless hours in college, grad school, and beyond working on my scales. It was just something you did that somehow “made you better” at your instrument.
To me, it was generally connected to playing solos and figuring out ways to get around the guitar neck better. Kind of vague, but it worked for me.
But I finally heard something that made scales a lot more useful for me – and more meaningful to practice. As a bonus, it also made songs so much easier to learn.
In Bruce Formans course on learning tunes, he says that somewhere around 80% of the melodies in jazz revolve around the major scale.
And he’s right -there might be some key changes or slight variations here and there. But understanding that your melodies are generally going to follow a scale pattern makes life a whole lot easier.
Each scale pattern is a template you can follow when you’re learning the melody to a song. Even if the song doesn’t follow the scale exactly, it’s a solid starting point.
Scales are also your fastest route to playing good jazz guitar solos. If you can get good at playing melodies using your scale patterns, you’re also going to be able to come up with your own melodies – either in writing a song of your own, or improvising a solo.
Your scales are where a lot of the cool stuff in jazz guitar comes from – so jump on in. Here are some of the basic patterns I would start with if I were you:
Major Pentatonic Scales
Minor Pentatonic Scales
Major Scales
Natural Minor Scales
Arpeggios
Arpeggios are really important for developing your improvisation skills. But for guitar players, they aren’t really that useful at first. Let me explain.
This is an area where the music theory behind arpeggios is simple, but the guitar player’s reality around arpeggios is not.
There are a lot of jazz improvisation approaches that stress learning and using arpeggios early on – and for a good reason.
For most instruments, these are simple, 4 note patterns that are easy to get under your fingers. And they tend to be a quick way to get younger horn and piano players sounding good and “making the changes.”
But those other instruments don’t have the fretboard to deal with.
Don’t get me wrong – every instrument has its own set of problems…
… and the fretboard is ours.
What is a simple sequence of notes on a trumpet or saxophone is a sometimes daunting combination of hand shifts and string skips on the guitar.
And when you account for how our patterns work across the fretboard, you really need to be working in more than a 4 note chunk – you need to be working on arpeggio patterns that go all the way across the 6 strings.
So when it comes to working on your arpeggios, it’s best to take your time.
Remember – arpeggios are not a fast track to better jazz guitar solos. They are a slow and steady track to much better jazz guitar solos.
I tell my students that early on, it’s best to think of your arpeggios as a technique exercise. They will eventually be a great way to boost your solo skills – you just gotta put in the time up front to develop your patterns.
Here are the 4 most essential jazz guitar arpeggios for you to learn:
Major 7 Arpeggios
Dominant 7 Arpeggios
Minor 7 Arpeggios
Minor 7b5 (Half Diminished) Arpeggios
Start working these into your practice sessions, and you’ll be making the changes in no time!
How to Make Progress Playing Jazz Guitar
A big mistake most people make when they start learning how to play jazz guitar is that they look for a simple, step by step path. For the “one book” that has it all.
It makes sense logically, but it’s just not how learning jazz guitar works. And honestly, every book or course I’ve seen that tries to do it all turns out clunky and hard to use.
It’s much better to use a more modular approach – learning each skill separately, and putting them together when it actually makes sense for your ability level.
What you’re really looking at is 3 separate paths – each with their own twists and turns. Each skill has its own progression – chords, scales, and arpeggios all have different difficulties and trajectories.
Sometimes these paths will overlap.
Working on using arpeggios to play over chord changes, for example – you’ll be looking at how arpeggio shapes overlap with scale shapes.
When you really dive into chords and making them smoother – you’ll see how your chord shapes line up with scale shapes.
When you’re working on songs or learning solo guitar skills, you’ll be working a little with each skill at the same time.
But for the most part, it’s helpful to realize that each skill has its own path that you can follow. Your progression is more like a spiral than a straight line – especially if you’re using the skill cycling approach we talked about earlier.
You’re just circling closer and closer to the sounds you really want to make. Like some kind of jazz guitar playing bird of prey.
So follow my skill cycling approach. When you’re working on chords, just figure out the next thing you need to do to make your chords better.
The same goes for scales and arpeggios.
My general rule of thumb is to find the simplest thing you can’t quite do yet, and work on that. This has worked much better for me than trying to find the coolest thing I could work on to make my solos sound more advanced.
If you do this, you’ll find your overall skill level going up – slowly and steadily (the only way that really works).
Learning How to Play Jazz Guitar Through Songs
Songs are an essential part of learning how to play jazz guitar.
This might seem obvious – most people don’t pick up jazz guitar hoping to play a bunch of cool exercises. We want to play some tunes!
But as people become more advanced, playing songs can kind of take a back seat. The more you learn, the more little details start popping up. Shiny little details that distract you from playing songs.
It’s easy to tell yourself you’ll get to tunes once you’re “ready” (whatever that means). You’ve got licks to learn, voicings to master, and countless ii V I variations to get under your fingers before you’re “ready” to play songs, right?
Nope – don’t make this mistake (I sure did).
Songs are your blueprint to actually playing jazz guitar. They’re not just something we work up to doing one day. They can be the thing you base your entire practice session around!
Not only will you be able to see the direct application of any skills you’re working on, you’ll have something you can play when someone says; “You play jazz guitar? Can you play me something?”
(No one wants to hear you play your scales at that point… trust me)
Some of the things songs can help you practice:
- Jazz guitar chords: While playing through the cycle of 4ths (or any other 12 key pattern) is great, songs give you a slightly more limited amount of chords to play through. I always find limitations like this to be helpful in actually getting something done.
- Melodies are built around scales and arpeggios: Most jazz standards follow the major scale pretty closely – so just practicing a melody in all 5 major scale shapes becomes a really useful practice technique.
- Improvising over tunes lets you work on scales, arpeggios, and even chord shapes – depending on what you choose to work on.
- Arranging chord melodies of your songs is a fantastic (if kind of brutal) way to increase your usable chord vocabulary
The list goes on – you’re only limited by your imagination. Once you can even just hack through a tune, I recommend you start building your practice around it.
I typically tell my students to build up to a “playlist” of 5 tunes they’re working on.
You don’t need to pick all 5 at once -just pick one. And when you’ve kind of got the hang of it, keep it around to play for fun or review how things go.
Then pick another tune to learn, and get going!
When something gets stale, “retire” it for a while and add another tune to the list. You’re not necessarily trying to get anything perfect here – just giving yourself different progressions and melodies to play with from time to time.
I used to change what tune I focused on weekly – but any period of time that lets you feel like you’ve made some progress works just fine.
Continuing Your Journey
Learning how to play jazz guitar is something that’s never done. There is always something new to discover, and old skills you can improve on or polish.
You have to come back to things over and over to remind yourself how to do them. And you have to put things aside after you’ve worked on them – to let your mind absorb what you’ve learned.
This is why my skill cycling approach works so well. You dive deep into one area for a week or two, focusing deeply on that single thing.
You can review your other skills in the background through playing songs, but you’re only actively working to improve one particular skill.
Once you’ve been at it for a while, you set that skill aside to work on the next area. Even when you’re not actively practicing a certain skill, your mind is still working on it in the background. Digesting what you’ve learned through practice.
When you come back to that skill in a few weeks, it’s somehow better than when you left it (or at least it comes back quick – both of these things can happen).
I’ve come to believe that most of our learning in jazz guitar isn’t done when we read the scale diagram, or first get the chord shape under our fingers.
In my experience, the real learning happens when we come back to old material:
- Trying to remember how that chord goes
- Fixing a mistake in that scale pattern when we tried to play it from memory
- Having to re-look up that chord progression in a song we’re coming back to
The magic is in the review.
One of the great things about jazz is there is always something new for us to learn. There are new ways you can navigate a chord progression.
Different chord choices for a particular song you didn’t see before.
A new approach to a song that seems obvious now – but never would have occurred to you a month ago.
You will be a different guitar player in 6 months.
And in a year.
And in 5 years.
New skills and experience will always give you a new perspective on things you already know.
Here’s an example:
When we were preparing to record my wife’s big band album Tricks of Light, I wrote a lot of notes to myself in the music.
Finger numbers above specific notes to make sure I had my hand in the right spot, clues to what chord voicing to play, things like that.
I always do this kind of thing with big band music – especially when I’m on a short timeline or working towards a single performance or recording session.
A year or so later, the same band played at the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival in Portland, Oregon.
As I got into the book of music again, I looked at the notes I had written on the page.
“What was I thinking back then!?”
About a year of practice and experience had given me a totally different perspective on the best ways to play that music.
I was a different guitar player than when we recorded the album.
Keep playing, practicing, and reviewing. You’ll keep getting better, and keep having new ideas about how to play the guitar.
Conclusion
Learning how to play jazz guitar is a lifelong process. You can always improve your skills, and add new ones to your bag of tricks.
But it’s also something you can get the basics of pretty quickly. It doesn’t have to take you more than an afternoon to get going with the 2 easy jazz guitar chords – and you’re playing through songs!
The most important thing you can do if you want to learn how to play jazz guitar is this:
Just start.
Pick something to work on, and keep trying – chipping away at the skill over time. Chords or scales are both great areas to start with – depending on what is more interesting for you.
You can always add more skills later on as you improve. Take it easy, be patient with yourself, and keep working at it.
You’ll be a jazz guitar player before you know it.