Online Jazz Guitar Lessons

For the Love of Jazz

If you have a love for jazz music and the guitar, it's only natural to want to combine them and learn to play great jazz yourself. Whether you're learning guitar from scratch or you simply want to learn jazz techniques to incorporate into your playing, online jazz guitar lessons can help you achieve your goal.

Let's review a few of the better jazz guitar sites on the Internet and see what they have to offer.

Finding Online Jazz Guitar Lessons

JazzGuitar.be

Jazz Guitar.be is actually a very comprehensive site that takes quite a while to really go through. It's operated by Dirk Laukens, combination jazz player, teacher and web master. The info on the site is certainly good for jazz beginners, but you can also delve into music theory if you're looking for a complete jazz guitar education. Visitors are invited to register with the site to have full access to all that it offers, but there is a lot here that you can check out and use without becoming a member. Let's look at some of the site's highlights.

• Online jazz lessons: Of course, this is our main objective. Lessons cover the various scales, arpeggios, chords and techniques used in jazz music. Lessons also cover the various styles found within the jazz genre, including bebop and blues.
• Jazz licks: Licks are important to improvisation, a major aspect of jazz guitar. You can learn to play licks from some of jazz's greatest artists, but the site stresses only using these as stepping stones to opening up your own creativity.
• Jazz chords: Here you'll find charts for chords from basic to advanced, including learning how to slide up frets to new chords. There's also a section on jazz chord theory.
• Jazz sheet music: This is another good resource. The sheet music you'll find here includes some standard musical notation, as well as tablature and chord charts.

This is only a small portion of what this website has to offer. It's well worth it to spend some time at the site to see if it's the right fit for you.

JazzGuitar.com

JazzGuitar.com is fairly straightforward with a series of 19 jazz guitar lessons that take you through all the major aspects. The great thing about this site is that you can listen to examples of what you're trying to learn. If you don't already have RealPlayer downloaded to your computer, the site provides a link to do so.

Be warned, this site isn't for the guitar novice. You need to have an understanding of basic guitar and the ability to read usic before you're ready. However, once you have that, this site will introduce you to the world of jazz guitar.

FreeGuitarVideos.com

FreeGuitarVideos.com has a lot to offer. The site contains lessons for everything from basic beginning guitar through specific musical genres including jazz guitar.

The website is divided between free lessons and premium/pay lessons that will take you a lot farther into each subject. You can explore both lead and rhythm guitar. The free lessons are great as starters, and if you're just looking to add some jazz techniques and flavor to your playing, they'll certainly help you do it. The premium lessons are a good deal at approximately $5.00 each, and are worth the investment if you want to become a serious aficionado.

GuitarMadeSimple.com

GuitarMadeSimple.com is operated by Chris Standring, and his basic philosophy is to keep things simple. Chris' jazz lessons are available as Play What You Hear, something that many of us wish we could just do. For a roughly $100.00 investment, you can download this program and begin taking lessons at your own pace. The 29 lessons found in this package cover melody, harmony, playing over changes and phrase development. You'll get plenty of diagrams and charts as well as audio recordings to illustrate exactly how things should sound.

Dirk Laukens' site, JazzGuitar.be, actually links to Chris Standring's lessons too, so this program may be worth looking into for yourself.

The Most Important Lesson

You can take all the online jazz guitar lessons you like, but the surest way to bring those lessons to life is to spend time listening to the great jazz artists perform. Go to live performances whenever you can. Listen to recordings from the likes of Charlie Parker or Joe Pass. They'll help you feel jazz down to your soul, and that's essential if you're serious about becoming a true jazz guitarist yourself.