Jazz Guitar Lesson #4 Poor Man's Chord Melody

     



Jazz Guitar Lesson 4 adding guidetones





When
a piano player plays Jazz he or she can play the melody with the right
hand and then play chords at the same time with the other hand..easy,
right? This is in my opinion one of the reasons that the piano trio is
such a popular format in Jazz. Now what if we want to do the same thing
on guitar. Impossible some you say..I think not! We just have to make
the chords smaller. This way of playing that I want to show you in this
lesson comes from players like Lenny Breau. If you haven't checked him
out. Do it NOW! This technique or concept was shown to me by another
Canadian guitarist: Ted Quinlan who I was studying with a few years
back.



The point of all this to able to comp for
yourself when you are playing the melody or even soloing. In another
word: fire the piano player and the band will have more money to split
among themselves! :p



Here is the concept:



Play the melody on the top two strings with the index and pinky.



Play the guide tones on the lower strings using the second and third fingers.



That's it!



As
you can see in the video we will run into some fingering problems when
it's better to abandon these rules and come up with other fingerings.



There are other similar concepts as well, maybe you have seen Kurt Rosenwinkels clinic from Gdansk?



Kurt Rosenwinkel Clinic Gdansk (chord melody) 



Here is a documentary about Lenny Breau



Lenny Breau The Genius Of documentary