I am sure you have heard Wes, George Benson or Joe Pass play great chord solos, and it is a great sound that seems almost impossible to get into your own playing, but if you are a little practical about how you start working on it then it may not be as difficult as you think. In this lesson, I am going to take one area of the neck and a II V I in G major and then I will show you how to start making your own chord solo licks with a few voicings that you probably already know.
Keep in mind that this will help you develop your own chord solos, but it can also be a great addition to your comping and chord melody arrangements. I am going to build this up using drop2 voicings. The starting point is this II V I in G major. A chord solo is a melody that is harmonized with chords, so from these chords you want to be able to play a melody. Let’s start with the Am7 and the D7.

For Am7 you caa use these 4 melody notes which only really use two chords: In the sheet music I have written out what extensions are in the chord, but that is not that important, you can better just think of all of them as Am7 and as chords you can use to make melodies You might be thinking, 4 notes? That’s not enough for solos! But actually you can make some really good melodies just with these simple voicings Chord solos tend to have a lot simple melodies, which is good because that also makes it a lot easier to play them. Since you are playing a full chord you don’t have to spell out the harmony with arpeggios and It is as much about the rhythm. Here is another basic example:
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For now I am going to stick with one Gmaj7 voicing and then we can expand on that later in the video along with adding alterations and some different types of chromatic chords. With these voicings then you already can make a line like this: The melody is pretty simple and I am as much trying to make the rhythm interesting while having a strong stepwise (and often repeating) melody.
The next thing to do is to add some chromatic chords. For the Am7 you could add two chromatic leading notes to the melody that you can harmonize by inserting a chord that is a going to slide into its target note from a half step below: You can play the slides like that or pluck both chords. The same but then descending where I am adding an Eb7 that moves down to D7 would be this: With these chromatic passing chords you can now make a much more interesting II V I lick like this: And as you can see I am just using the chords and melodies from the previous examples. How to work on this and get it into your playing. When you practice this then you should first just play through the exercises and get those into your fingers a bit. If you then use my examples as inspiration to make some II V I licks for yourself and from there move it into a song that you know. Remember that a great way to practice this is also to use that way of thinking and playing when you are comping, there you have more time to work with it and it doesn’t have to be so busy so you can really get the techniques and the melodies into your playing in a more natural way.
If you look at a D7(b9): D F# A C Eb then that is really a F#dim with a D in the bass. This is useful because diminished chords are symmetrical so they are really really easy to move around on the guitar and that makes them perfect for chord solos. For the area of the neck that I am using that means that I have these voicings: This you could use in a II V I like this: On the D7 you can also use chromatic chords similar and here that means more dim chords which are nice and easy to play
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Now we can have a look at what to do with the Gmaj7. Here are 3 voicings that will work really well. Notice that I am using a G6 to harmonize when the G is in the melody. This is also going to give us some more options in the next section.
There are few ways to add chromatic movement to a Gmaj7. The first one is a similar passing chord to the previous examples, but the second one is keeping some of the chords in one place and move the outer voices in half steps.Getting started with jazz guitar often seems intimidating to many players. Today, I'm here to tell you that with strong fundamentals and consistent, diligent practice, you can also play jazz guitar.
Teaching jazz guitar to a beginner is kind of unusual. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who started out with jazz from the very beginning.
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Move these shapes around and find the root notes along the fretboard. These are known as shell voicings because they only make use of the shell of the chord.
Next, we'll give you 3 simple licks you can use to get you started over II-V-I progressions. All of these make use of highlighting important chord tones on strong beats.
This is a descending minor triad leading stepwise into the 3rd of the G7 and finally arpeggiating up the chord and down to the 5th of C (G).
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Here we have a somewhat inverted version of the first lick. This is an ascending Dm7 arpeggio that - once again - hits the 3rd of the G7 (B) and descends in stepwise fashion to the 3rd of the C (E).
Lastly, we have something slightly different. We're making use of some chromaticism and landing on the 3rd of the G7, then descending from there in a stepwise fashion to the 3rd of C (E).
We won't go over all of the theory here as it is beyond the scope of this article, but you can find everything you need in our lessons on the basics of harmony and improv:
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Jazz tends to make use of some pretty sophisticated language so it's important to learn to crawl before you can walk, so to speak. I'm assuming you have already learned a few chords and basics, but let's make sure we've got some fundamentals down.
It's very important to pay attention to articulation in jazz. Knowing which notes to play staccato (short or abrupt) and which to hold out, is as important as being able to swing your 8th notes.

Listen to your favorite players and pay attention to how they articulate their phrases. Being able to do this can really add a whole other dimension of contouring to phrases of your own.
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A great example of this is, of course, Miles Davis. Check out some of his concerts and pay particular attention to this. I think you'll really get a lot out of it.
This concept is somewhat abstract and can be a bit tricky to explain accurately. The best way to think about it is as if two 8th notes are played like an 8th note triplet where the two beats of the triplet are tied.
Right, but it's probably the closest explanation to it. Much like with articulation, the best way to understand this concept is to listen to the same great players I mentioned previously.
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Of course, I'm going to send you back to the same concerts! Check out how Tony Williams phrases on drums and listen to his swing feel to get a good idea.

A great way to practice this is to simply take one note on the guitar and try to emulate the swing feel he uses in these performances.
As mentioned previously, going into all of the theory is beyond the scope of this lesson, but you can access some of the information you'll need with our Gentle Intro to Scale Theory page.
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With that said, however, I'd like to briefly mention three modes of the major scale that will begin to lay the groundwork for you. Here they are as they would fall in a II-V-I in C major.
Beginners often mistakenly learn these modes and think they've figured out improvisation. The truth is, however, that improv is more about language than it is about technical information like scales or arpeggios.
That's why it's important to listen. Listen to your favorite players and maybe even begin trying to transcribe what they're doing and play along with them.
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Before you get to that, though, you will definitely want to get all of your triads down in all their inversions on all sets of strings.
Many beginners learn their first cowboy chords and forget to really explore learning all of the triads all over the neck. This is a huge mistake for a number of
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