Staying Out of the Mud in Jazz Guitar

Video Transcript

Hello! My name is Dustin, and I am going to give a quick jazz guitar lesson on staying out of the mud. In jazz, as a chord player, much of the time you will be comping, or improvising the songs chord progression, while a soloist plays an improvised solo over the top, it is your job to keep the song’s chord progression going in an interesting way without falling into repetitive ruts, all the while staying out of the mud. Now when you are playing solo jazz guitar, full voice chords can be very useful, they fill up the sound and they sound great, but the low note you include the 5th sounds great, but in a jazz context with the combo, often times you have a bass player playing the root of each chord, and playing those full voice chords can actually muddy things up quite a bit. So one thing you can do to stay out of that mud is to take the 7th chords that you learned how to build earlier, and just use the important notes in the chord the root, the 3rd and the 7, and just play little triads on the upper four strings. So in a C major 7th chord, you go from this to root, 3rd and 7th to this; lightens things up quite a bit. You can find these triads in different inversions up and down the neck, and keep things like that way. Same goes for the minor 7th chord; we have this kind of sound… you can change that to this… lightens things up. Same as true with the dominant 7th chord, goes from this… to this… So find those inversions up and down the neck, and it will open things up for you quite a bit. If you are playing altered dominant chords, you want to make sure to include the altered note in your voicing, and as you get more advanced you can drop out the root in these triads, play the 3rd the 7th and upper 9th, 11th, 13th interval based on your preference.

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