Watching jazz guitarists play can be a wonderful source of inspiration to seek jazz guitar instruction. Experiencing the sounds produced by their fantastic picking control can be an exciting feeling.
Jazz guitar instruction mainly aims at synchronizing your right and left hands. Combined with a lot of practice, you could be playing some fast and smooth jazz music. If you have watched jazz guitar players performing, the speed at which they play is amazing. It is not just the fact that they are playing fast, but with a total freedom that flows unrestrained. They have mastered their speed picking techniques and are able to improvise with complete ease, which is why their solos sound terrific.
Jazz guitar instruction covers the jazz guitar chord theory, the scales, the pentatonic scales, triads, arpeggios, etc. Several websites online provide guitar transcriptions, licks and patterns that you can use for practicing your guitar solos.
The Techniques You Develop Are Your Gear
Jazz guitar instruction emphasizes on the development of techniques whether you play solo, lead or rhythm. Once you learn the chords, scales, and arpeggios and know all the basic notes, you concentrate on your technique and speed. It helps to listen to yourself so that you can figure out where you need to improve. Your right hand and left hand – or rather, your fretting hand and picking hand must coordinate with each other perfectly so that you can hear the sound you intended to.
It is natural to find that your speed is hindering you when you are following your jazz guitar instruction, but focused attention to practice will take you to your goal. Using a metronome can help a great deal, as it will assist you in assessing your progress. You can practice your favorite guitar lick repeatedly and time yourself at different speeds. Watch how your hands move and try to get the effortless flow through practice. Great jazz guitar players listened to their own music repeatedly to monitor their playing so that they could focus on improvement. You need total control over your picking and fretting speed and this will come from practicing at various speeds over and over again. Instructors advise their students to play the guitar lick for two minutes non-stop, at each speed increment. Systematic practice is the key to mastering the technique that will become yours.
Improvise!
Jazz has a language all its own that players use to communicate with their audience. An excellent knowledge of scales is essential if you want to be a good improviser. The main reason to learn scales is that they help you visualize your fretboard. They help you learn the tonality in a set of notes so that you know how they will sound when you play a certain chord or go through a chord progression. In fact, the most improvised are the rhythms. You will find that you must have a repertoire of jazz swing rhythms in order to be able to accompany and improvise. So in case the song is in a particular style – funk or swing, you will need to improvise to play along. If a C major seventh chord is being played for two measures, it implies that you can improvise with any voicing of C major seventh chord or a substitute along with any matching rhythm.
The main thing about jazz guitar instruction is that you must learn all the notes on each and every key, as this will help your improvising abilities. Skipping strings will limit your creativity as you learn to master the techniques.