Insights, tips, and techniques to elevate your jazz guitar playing.
"Back cycle" is one of those terms that gets used loosely in jazz pedagogy. Strictly speaking, it's a chain of ii-V resolutions cycling backward through the circle of fifths to a target. Randy Johnston's MMC class lays out the specific lines and voicings.
"Going outside" is jazz shorthand for deliberate, controlled dissonance — playing material that doesn't belong inside the current chord, hearing the tension build, then resolving back. Genil Castro's MMC class walks through one of the cleanest entry points.
Self-comping — playing chords under your own solo lines on a single instrument — is one of the harder things to do well on the jazz guitar. It's also one of the most useful. A look at the courses and the practice approach that actually move the needle.
Jimmy Wyble's lasting contribution to jazz guitar isn't the Bob Wills swing or the Hollywood studio work — it's the two-line contrapuntal style captured in his etudes, and the lineage of MMC instructors who carry it forward.
Double stops — two notes played simultaneously — are one of those guitar techniques that look small on paper and end up doing a lot of work in practice. Ed Bickert, Barney Kessel, Johnny Smith, and Howard Roberts built large parts of their soloing vocabulary around them.
Phrasing is what separates technically competent improvising from soloing that actually feels alive. A list of tunes Steve Herberman uses for phrasing study — drawn from his MMC Jazz Phrasing series — and a working approach for using them.
In Sid Jacob’s latest class, he takes more than five jazz standards including Bill Evan’s “Very Early”,...
Sid JacobsI still remember some of my earliest experiences playing in a band. So much of it was learning on the …
Az Samad
This is Part Two of a two-part series on using triad pairs contrapuntally consisting of: Volume One: focuses on contrapuntally...
Michael Bryant
Steve Herberman offers a tremendous amount of information on the use of creating counterpoint lines using triad pairs that he...
Michael BryantFrom the beginning, Sid demystifies what counterpoint is by beautifully improvising on Wayne Shorter?s ballad ?Infant Eyes?. You...
Michael Bryant
In this latest masterclass by Sid Jacobs, we get to see his take on the Gershwin classic, “It Ain’t Necessarily...
Az Samad