Blues Comping and Diminished Chords || Jazz Guitar Lessons Daily 44

From our free, Jazz Guitar Lessons Daily Series: Lesson 44
Thursdays - How Chords Move
3/11/21


In yesterday’s lesson we discussed how to use, and improvise over, fully diminished 7 chords when they don’t resolve like an inversion of a 7b9 chord. Specifically playing the Bº7 chord and resolving it down to a Bb-7.

Today we’re exploring some harmonic options that open up when we apply diminished chords to the 12 bar blues… specifically the jazz blues.

If you open up the real book to an Ab blues, you’ll probably see something like this chord progression notated above the melody.

[see full post linked below for notated example]

But remember, you don’t HAVE TO play these chords. Yes. You need to be able to play them. Confidently. And with love and admiration for them. But if you can ONLY play them, and don’t have the ability to insert alternative harmonic motion and pathways through the form, eventually you’ll find yourself feeling stuck and bored.

This is why I love exploring ideas like what this comping etude is all about. Taking a diminished chord, and see how we can apply it to a chord progression in a way that still respects and implies the form, but frees us up to move in more unexpected ways.

Download the PDF to checkout the etude I’m playing in the video. It’s very beginner in the sense that I wrote it only using simple, 3-note, shell voicings and only using half notes and whole notes - no advanced voicings or tricky rhythms. But it’s also somewhat advanced because I’m using chords you wouldn’t expect to see in the real book or in iRealb.

These chords are all about create movement. How do we look ahead to a chord that’s coming up in the form, target it, and then put a series of chords before it that will organically lead our ear towards it to carry us...


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