Originally Posted by: CSchlegelGood deal! First, I'd encourage you to look at my Intro to Jazz Guitar (if you haven't already studied it):

http://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=519[/QUOTE]
Ah this is the tutorial that put me off Jazz way back! I'd just learned how to do A/E shape barre chords and had no idea why you would want to mess up a perfectly good and already hard enough to play chord by adding some random note to it! Then you wanted me to learn even more awkward shapes - I got out of there and fled back to triads and power chords so quick. Progress feels great.

I've recently been focussed on your extended harmony stuff and am finding those incredibly useful because extension of chord vocab is pretty much my main aim lately - something I neglected a bit while learning all those three note per string mode patterns and shred licks. Those tutorials have really piqued my interest in Jazz, which is something I wasn't really into before I

I wanted to have all of those chords and at least a third on the bottom inversion for each chord type before I move onto the drop 2 stuff, just because I figure it makes sense to know the whole chords before you drop tones and do crazy moving bassline things with them?

Originally Posted by: CSchlegelTraditionally, jazz soloing is about playing the melody, then altering it by ornamentation, then using it as a strating point or platform from which to connect the chords of the tune with approach tones. This means that any given chord might be regarded as a the I or i chord of a miniature "localized" ii-V-I/i progression & how the playing achieves this is his individual style.

As for your breakdown, it helped a lot right away thanks Chris! In particular the bit about learning the original melody - I'd never thought to do that because I thought, "hey I'm trying to play Jazz and its all about improvisation so I should be making up the entire melody straight from my head." I think that was the main thing going wrong.

So I learned the original melody and it gave a road map for where to go musically and also emotionally. I think that was your point - alter the melody a bit maybe with the nearby notes, or chromaticism, or arpeggios, or go off track a lot if you want but whatever you do make sure to return and relate it to something based on the original melody and you should come out with something nice that makes sense with the standard. To do that you have to know the melody in the first place. The only downside is I was forced to use standard notation to learn it. Yuck! :P

The localised ii-V-I thing I tried mainly over the Gmaj7-Cmaj-7 change and it rocked! I started just playing Dm7 - G7 - Cmaj7 to get the sound into my head, then went mainly D Dorian-G mixo-Cmaj7 and it sounded weird but really nice. It kind of didn't make sense but resolved nicely and made sense in retrospect as a result. Its fun to think of it as like a little modulation out of then back into key - which is exactly the kind of sound I was trying to develop. I'll definitely keep busy exploring this concept for a while and coming up with a few ways of doing it.

Tomorrow's challenge will be doing something interesting over that chromatic sequence you mentioned, and that I've just been playing a B note over so far.

[QUOTE=CSchlegel]The next step is to develop your own vocabulary. You should have standard licks, or ways of playing through progressions that you like, that you've developed because you like the sound of them. The bigger your set of pre-established licks is, the more you mix, match, alter, interchange & interconnect all these things.

This is pretty well where I feel I'm up to, although I've noticed you never really stop learning step 1. I've been eyeing Hanspeter's modal jazz licks and his Django Reinhardt style lesson for a while so I might do a study of those. I already use his rock improv and mixolydian stuff a lot in my blues playing - and I've noticed that, when Jazz flies over your head, the blues scale is like a big safety net - when in doubt play the blues scale and all will be fine!

As for your Joe Pass lead lessons, I'll be watching it as soon as it is up. It'd be great to get some insight into his approach.