How to Get the Jazz Sound From Your Guitar

Part of the Video Series How to Play Jazz Guitar

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Learn how to get a jazz sound from a guitar from a recording artist in this free music lesson video.

Contact: www.dustinplumb.net

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Tags: jazz fingering, jazz guitar, jazz picking, jazz sound, jazz swing, jazz techniques
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Posted by Martunes on Saturday, 11 November, 2006 at 5:22 PM

(mark as spam)

good advice! you might add flatwounds as well

Video Transcript

How to Get the Jazz Sound From Your Guitar
Hello! My name is Dustin, and I am going to talk about how to get a traditionally non-jazz electric to work for a jazz sound. I have already covered many of the aspects of what traditionally make a jazz guitar. A jazz guitar, I think one of the most important points I can make is that there is no wrong guitar for jazz, and really any guitar will do. I will show you a few things you can try to make a traditionally non-jazz electric be a little bit more jazzy sounding, and hopefully you can experiment and find your tone using whatever guitar you might own. Here is a Paul Reed Smith, considered most of the time to be a high gain rock guitar, sometimes used in blues but almost never really used in jazz, and it is true. If you have this guitar set to the bridge pickup setting, and you have your tone control set to its brightest setting, this guitar can be pretty brash and bright sounding, a little bit harsh for jazz, looks great for rock… For jazz it does not really work all that well, so a place to start is with your pickup selector, go ahead and switch it to the neck position. You have already noticed a difference in tone, it is a lot warmer… softer in some ways. Still a little bit bright for jazz, so take your tone control from the brightest setting and slowly roll it back till you reach that sweet spot… Make sure you are picking close to the neck as well, still little bit bright, little bit bright… right out there… a little bit more… there we go and that sounds little bit funny for rock…still a little bit muddy for rock but for jazz it can work great… try that with your guitar and see what happens. Good luck.

About the Expert

Expert: Dustin Plumb is a recording artist, who has a Bachelors' in Music from the University of Oregon. He resides in Las Vegas where he runs a sound design company called DP creative. Read More