Help geting me started

[vs2313]

hello i have been pretty intrested in starting to play jazz guitar.
recently i have just been trying to improve my chord vocabulary. I ve alos been listing to more jazz(Joe pass, Miles Davis and django rienhert)

So what im asking is can you guys point me in the right direction in what to pratice in my routine.

Things that i work on already are:
Scales (major, minor, pentatonic)
Sightreading
Run through some chord prgressions

Can you guys add any thing to this and any other tips would be cool


thanks

[derek]

Welcome to the group. I would suggest learning your 7th chords, and arpeggios. So maj7, min7, dom7, m7b5 chords in root positions (6th, 5th, & 4th string roots), and the arpeggios that go with them.

The quote "jazz lives above the 7th" is right, and you need a collection of chords in order to get around tunes. From there, I would strongly suggest getting a version of the Real Book, so you can get working on tunes right away. Good luck

[Drumbler]

Get this book.

It's about $8.

[lindydanny]

Okay, I'm going to be a newbie real quick (what else is new?):

I think I know what an arpeggio is. But, I think I am probably wrong. Anyone want to help me out with the definition?

~DB

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

Those arpeggios ascend and descend. Either half is still an arp.

[abdke99]

check out many topics on that subject you have here, but most important thing is that you love it

welcome

[JohnRoss]

Originally Posted by lindydanny

Anyone want to help me out with the definition?

The non-musical term for an arpeggio is "broken chord," which means the notes in a chord played one at a time instead of all together. But...

...to confuse things, "chord" doesn't mean quite the same here as "guitar chord." It means some notes that you pick out of a scale, then play all at the same time. This is often hard to do on a guitar, but it's very easy on a piano.

And it isn't just any "broken chord," either, you have to play arpeggios in a particular way, starting at the bottom, going up and then coming down again, as you do for a scale. And in the same way as a melody based on a scale is not itself a scale, there are lots of different ways of picking out the notes in a chord, and most of them aren't actually arpeggios.

So, on a guitar or another melody instrument, the easiest way to find arpeggios is often by playing a scale and omitting notes. If you look at BDLH's example, you can see how he has taken a scale of G and made an arpeggio. You play the first note, omit the second, play the third, omit the fourth, play the fifth, then omit the sixth and seventh notes, then play the octave before you come down again. If you start on the third or fifth note instead of the first, you get different kinds of arpeggio, and if you play the seventh note instead of omitting it, you discover a whole heap of new arpeggios, but I think that's enough for now. But just note how the G minor arpeggio is built in the same way as the G major one, only using the minor scale instead.