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My two pence would be to focus on harmony as much as melody. Don't know your level so please ignore accordingly..
1. Try and adopt a system of memorisation - CAGED for me but whatever works for you. Learn to see/hear the intervals in relation. Sing em as you play... shout out the names..doing this forces you to be active and not passive.
2. Try and expand your chord vocab within the above always actively trying to analyse the chord tones/intervals. Grab a progression and actually relate each chord to the relevant master system i.e. this is in the C shape in CAGED and shout out the degrees in the chord. You may wanna shout out the notes as well for good measure..
3. Change the key lots of the progression - forces you to be active i.e. have to think again.
4. Rinse and repeat gradually increasing harmonic complexity.
5. Get Chord Chemistry and Leon White's guide if you want to understand at a deep level.
From a melodic development perspective
1. Learn the lines of the masters! A solid knowledge of ii-V-I lines is the real key to getting your jazz chops together. This is pretty much how every decent jazz player got going and it works.. Take a line, understand it and the chord tones it outlines. Try and re-phrase it, try and modify it to taste. Make it your own. Learn many of them and string em together. This is how it was done before the World invented the music education ecosystem and we lost our way in many ways..
These are the short cuts btw
Playing Jazz at any decent pace requires it to flow without conscious thought. Anyone who thinks that a bebop player is thinking about each chord/arpeggio/substitution/scale @ 160bpm is wrong. It's a language and you gotta learn it like you would learn any language; an approach that requires both study of why but stronger focus on vocab and how to use it.
Hope this helps.
Simon
IMO, like Blues, Jazz is something that you have to *feel* to play properly. The form was originally intended as dance music. A good deal of harder Rock is not.
For lead playing again Randy Vincent's Cellular Approach is great as is his Line Games book - no tab though, only standard notation. Jason Lyon's Pentatonic book is another good one that simplifies things into variations of pentatonics. Bruce Saunders has a pentatonic book too.
https://youtu.be/cklYR21TcNE
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
The CAGED system was maybe the biggest thing for me in terms of understanding across the neck, and once you've got basic CAGED chords under your belt, learning how to play your 7s, half diminished, diminished in those positions will come as well.
Sadly there is no short cut to this stuff, just time and focus. I think as guitar players a lot of us learnt to play when we were young and thankfully the process wasn't too traumatising as when you're young you can pick things up fast and don't have bills to go out and pay - but I do think we often lose that ability to learn something from scratch if we don't keep pushing ourselves on the instrument past what we learnt at 16 or whatever. It's good to break yourself down and approach jazz stuff (if you're interested of course) and build from the ground up - once you start seeing progress it's an addictive thing just like learning your first pentatonic, or learning how to alternate pick.
If you need to learn fast for a tour, I would say get the majority of the jazz chords under your belt from the E and A string positions (as mentioned above), for example Dm7b5 or Gmaj7. (cheat mode; 7's and flat 5's are fairly easy to play and are important to get right when comping, but any other numbers can often be ignored if there's someone else in the band to illustrate those top alternative voicings). Once you've learnt the jazz chords, which hopefully will be a day or two, then you'll find it really useful to play the arpeggios of those chords in just a couple positions for each chord maybe, to help navigate across the neck and between chords. Arpeggios for me were the 'eureka' moment in jazz blues playing.
Good luck!
All the songs have been transposed from their original keys, there are some leadsheets but they’re peppered with mistakes, and we do subtly different versions from the originals. Still, it’s interesting.
Thankfully I’ve got a guitar lesson this evening so that gives us something to focus on
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
You've helped me and I appreciate it
http://www.jazzstudies.us/
Band Stuff: https://navigationofficial.bandcamp.com/album/silhouette-ep
* Which would imply, falsely, that I've gone much beyond those basics.