I am a multi-instrumentalist but primarily a guitarist. Of all the instruments capable of playing multiple notes simultaneously the guitar has to be among the most confusing and illogical. Classical guitarists have had a couple of hundred years to get things sorted out but the electric guitar hasn't been around that long at all. In 40 plus years of learning, playing and teaching the guitar I have seen some good, and some horrendous attempts to teach harmony on the instrument and I have to say that this short video is one of the best. If you are trying to find your way as a guitarist this video will definitely help. Even if you are not trying to be a jazz guitarist Mr. Bruno's lesson will open up the neck of the guitar for you. Your fingerboard geography cannot help but be improved by applying these ideas. (In fact a thorough study of chords can only help the soloist). It took me years to learn what Jimmy Bruno has laid out here in easy to understand language. What an awesome lesson.
This is great guidance from Jimmy who is a great player - Discipline through patience, sustained application and relentless practice is the only path to actual reward - Jimmy is right - and he proves it by what he actually does - and so can you - but you must find your own voice - otherwise it just sounds derivative - you can only express yourself - we hear all these comments about Pass, McLaughlin, Holdsworth and others but, ultimately, you can't be anyone other than yourself - and that can be the hardest thing when there are so many of these wonderful guitarists you are so tempted to model yourself upon. Jimmy has found his voice only through years of diligent, assiduous effort - as he says - there is no short cut. It is very generous of Jimmy to post these interesting and absorbing videos on You Tube - However, he has written some great books - they are a worthwhile investment because he shows you a method that enables you to avoid wasting valuable time getting nowhere. Whilst there's no shortage of stuff on You Tube that can lead you up a blind alley, Jimmy shows you that there is light at the end of the tunnel. It's all good - and so is he.
Axe Man yeah it's kind of a shame. My old guitar teacher turned me onto him. check out burnin'...he blows away giant steps on that album. Him, Wes Montgomery, and Joe Pass are my favorite jazz players
Thank you for the masterful teaching. A straight forward jazz lesson for free?! So many players say it's simple but can't explain it... damn I need to practice
what's there NOT to like - he lays it all out perfectly provided you have some of the underlying theory and oh!....there's no shortcuts....this shit takes hours and hours but when it sinks in - it opens up the instrument..
Wata great no fuss lesson ! Some of the 6 432 inversions in each set of 4 are more resting chords and others are passing chords like u use when u r walking a bass line. I think JBs getting ur hands used to a basic chord shape foundation for chord melody incl walking bass - almost like the 'caged' system used for chord shape recognition .... and if you were Allan Holdsworth ur ears wld like the sound of the seventh on the bottom ! resting or passing ! :) it's interesting to me that both those players present chords and scales theory in a no fuss way in their video demos - tho JB is more into teaching than AH ... Great post !
I'd like to make my practice "exercises" involve practicing these chords by using them to play standards, (not thinking of the best-sounding way to play the standard or best voice leading, just killing two birds with one stone, getting familiar with the chords and standards at the same time.) There are about a million jazz standards, and I only recognize about 10 by name, and of those I know how maybe five of them sound. Can anyone recommend what standards would be the best for practicing chords? I guess what I'm thinking is the most popular standards with the most chords so I'm moving from chord to chord a lot while learning well-known tunes. I mean I'm going to browse through the real books and iReal on my own and listen, but I'm asking if someone could narrow it down with their recommendations?
VirtualWoodshed nope. Sadly I don't know where it's from. I have the no nonsense DVD and this isn't on it. He has another hotlicks video though I think and it maybe from that one
Thanks for the info. I need to just go ahead and buy both. I feel bad watching this youtube stuff knowing that Jimmy isn't making any money off it, but at the same time I'm glad it's here cause I learned a ton!
Its his online school. You can download a huge package via torrent if you look for it. I found it awhile ago and got like 100 hours of video from Jimmy Bruno teaching.. Its great..No non-sense jazz guitar is also great, but it much more condensced.
Jimmy says the heck with calling these what people call them. That its for arrangement for horns and scoring (drop 2 blah blah) I see he didnt do the other type with the 2 and skip 2 probably so not to overload whos learning
With all respect sir, learn something because it's there? 1.Our time is limited. 2. Chordinversions like those with a 7th or altered notes in a base don't really sound nice. I stick to Joe Pass who says that we may have 10.000 chords which are theoreticly correct but only 1000 we use in practice. There may be a good reason to learn them all which I don't know yet as a humble guitar student, but to learn them because they are there is not a good reason. But I guess I understand your point. Someone who has mastered the guitar like you did, just wants to know it all.
Joe Pass was right on in his attitude, and the voicings JB is showing are precisely THOSE few essential voicings, Drop 2 and Drop 3. A lot of voicings aren't practical on the guitar such as basic closed position voicings which require huge finger stretches and gymnastics. You'll find them in those 10,000 Chords type books, but they are not the mainstay of most jazz guitarists. Guys like Pass and Bruno discovered decades ago that the most efficient and useful voicings for guitar come from dropping either the 2nd or 3rd highest notes in those difficult voicings down to the bass of the chord. Rather than learning a chord book of 10,000 chords JB is saying learn only the the drop 2 and drop 3 shapes and their inversions, and know what scale degree each note is in the shape so you can then easily alter the chord to derive any other chord you'll ever need IN A PLAYABLE FORM.. Also, since virtually every guitar player uses these two voicing types, you'll quickly be able to visually recognize what chord another guitarist (such as Joe Pass) is playing most of the time. The real genius of Bruno's lesson is that he shows you how to learn only ONE chord, a Drop 3 dominant 7 on strings 6 432. He then shows that moving the bottom note to the top string (same note and fret) creates the other common voicing type, a Drop 2, now on strings 1234! That's the hardest part! From there you can derive all the inversions and voicings you'll ever need without ever consulting a chord book or a teacher. From one simple idea and only 4 shapes you can create almost all the chords you'll need as a jazz guitarist. The cool thing is that when you kow your Drop 2 and 3 shapes really well, you;ll in a giant book of chords and find yourself saying things like "Oh, that's just a Drop 2 dominant 7th shape on the middle strings with the root moved up a fret to the flat 9 to make a rootless 7 flat 9."And last of all, if you were to ONLY learn Drop 3 and Drop 2 and only for maj6 and min6 chords, you'd only learn 40 easy-to-play shapes TOTAL and yet sound like a pro because you can use those over different bass notes to get almost any modern sounding extended or altered chord you desire. I'd say that's pretty efficient learning! It all starts with the Drop 2 and Drop 3 taught here, for free no less!
horsepoetry One other thing I would add is concerning learning inversions of chords. Why should you bother learning 4 inversions of the same chord? Its all the same notes anyway, right? Its tough to want to commit to Bruno's lesson here if you can't see any use for it. So here's the why. If you want to play solo like Joe Pass there are two reasons why you have to know inversions. 1) The melody notes in a tune can be the root, 3rd, 5th, 7th or even the 9th, 11th or 13 of the chord for that measure. Your 4 inversions of a Drop 2 chord will have a top note that is either the root, 3rd, 5th or 7th of the chord. By knowing 4 inversions of a chord in Drop 2 you can quickly pick the one that has the needed melody note on top with the other 3 notes supporting underneath, like a horn section. If the melody then moves to another note within the chord, you can move to the inversion that has that note on top. So you are playing chords but also recreating the melody on top at the same time. You'll also develop ability to move the top melody note to a non-chord tone in the melody when needed while holding the other 3 notes steady underneath. Another technique you could now use would be to harmonize the non-chord tones in the melody with a Drop 2 diminished passing chord between your other chord-tone inversions. Knowing the inversions gives you the skill to play a moving 4 part harmonized melody line, which is about the coolest thing in jazz guitar!. This is a standard technique for chord melody playing. 2) The other skill that inversions get you is creating a walking bass on the bottom of your arrangement. In short, the bass typically walks from one chord tone to another with notes in between, say root-3rd-4-#4-5th, By knowing your inversions, the bass notes that fall on the root, 3rd and 5th can be accompanied by the chord inversion that has that note as the bass. The bass line takes you from one chord inversion to the next, or said another way, your inversions take you from one bass note to the next. You now can produce a walking bass line that also has chord comping or chord soloing along with it. Think of it another way: in comping you can pick your inversions so that the bass notes create a smooth walking bass line. You don't have to just sit on one chord shape for 4 beats. A smoothly voice-led bass line sounds far more connected, interesting and jazz-like than just jumping around from one random chord shape to another with whatever note happens to fall in the bass. Both of the techniques above are very common in Joe Pass's style. I'll agree that some of the inversions of certain chords don't sound great all on their own, but in the context of what I'm talking about here....creating a moving bass line under chords or harmonizing in 3 parts underneath a melody line......they sound fantastic and are classic Joe Pass (or Duke Ellington, for that matter). Finally,by taking several months to learn only what Bruno teaches in this video, you would have all you need to sit down with a real book and, in a few minutes time, create an on-the-spot solo arrangement of any jazz standard. Just as a joke, I sat down yesterday and created a jazz guitar arrangement of Happy Birthday using only Drop 2 inversions. Dumb waste of time, yes, but hey, you never know when or where your guitar super powers might actually be called upon! Christmas tunes anyone? Seriously though, learning just what Jimmy Bruno teaches here, opened up a whole world on the guitar for me, and I finally started to feel like a real musician, not just a "guitar player" with some tricks.
Now you definitely pointed out a good reason to learn some inversions. Thank you for that long interesting comment! I'll do some arrangements with a 3rd and 5th in a base to create a better flow on chord changes but I guess I'm not going to learn them all. I'm just having enough work with playing and singing. Given the huge amount of learnable things, every musician has to do a compromise. Looking for maximal practical benefit from the effort we put in. I'm going to think more about the base notes I play in chords after your comment. That's my benefit of your effort you put in. Regards.
Herr Schnupke I like how some inversions with the 7th in the bass sound, the dom7 for instance. Besides most of the 7th-in-the-bass shapes are not hard to learn. Learning that way it's not that many chords: 4 dom7, 4 maj7, 4 min7, 4 min7b5. The last two also give you 4 maj6 and 4 min6 for "free". In the last two cases if you skipped on learning the 7th/bass shape you would lose the relative 6 shape which would be a pity. Best to learn them all; play them in sequence; few of them are trouble (for me, the maj6 chord in the C shape especially), but those few force you to improve what your left hand is doing. So 4x4=16 shapes for a total of 24 chords for strings 6 4 3 2. Then add dim and +5 (easy). Then move on to other string sets. It's work but far less daunting than going mindlessly through one of those dreary "20,000 essential chord shapes" books.
