Fundamental Changes in Jazz Guitar: An In depth Study of Major ii V I Soloing for Bebop Guitar (Learn How to Play Jazz Guitar)

This book is great! Having a clear roadmap for how (and where in the measure) to connect arpeggios and scales gives you a good starting point for learning to understand and play jazz lines.

Take your time with this book. Best to put in 30 minutes two times a day. In a few weeks you will be moving through 251s with confidence. After a while your ear will pick it up. This book is fantastic because it gives you lots of examples to get you started. The backing tracks are nice, but I mostly use BIAB tracks in different styles and that gives you different ways to feel the progression. I also make a point of working in different keys. This helps with thinking less about fret position and more about chord shapes and degrees. Don't practice for 50 hours sitting on the same three chords! I highly recommend at the beginning to do all exercises in all keys. It's a great way to get familiar with key centers.

This book is so good, it gets you to play music right away and makes you learn arpegios the right way so you are able to start on any note not just root, and easy steps added each lesson so you are not overwhelmed by too much at once.Must have book for all guitarists.

This is an essential book if you are just starting out in jazz guitar --especially if you are already a rock or blues player. There is a key concept that is different about jazz compared to the way I was taught rock guitar: arpeggios vs scales. Early jazz was built on players who would outline a chord over and over again. To stand out, or out of boredom, they began to embellish with passing notes. Not scales, just notes that sounded good. The key was outlining the passing chords. This is so different to the way I was taught to improvise. I was taught entirely using first a minor pentatonic and then other scales. Major pentatonic, then the western 8 note major scale, then to be fancy modes of that scale.This book teaches you how to think of improvisation from an arpeggio perspective, not scales. It's hard. My brain doesn't see the fretboard that way. The examples are not terribly musical. Like any book covering basic technique, you have to stick with the non-musical sounding examples for a long time before you start to hear something you like. Still, Alexander's notion of keeping all examples to the same basic progression in the same key is VERY good. The book is not overly theory heavy, and they develop complexity in a rational way. Also, unlike other jazz books, it doesn't try to cover the author's total knowledge of music in one book. This is about learning how to improvise over a ii-V-I progression in the jazz tradition of using chord tones, not scales. That's it. That's a good thing!In short, if you want a good set of exercises that will help you develop the essential jazz improvisation techniques and have the patience of working through exercises that aren't super musical, this is an essential book in your collection.

I've been playing guitar off and on for about 20 years, and have, over that time, been able to piece together enough knowledge of jazz guitar to "fake" my way through playing a decent number of uncomplicated tunes. I own an embarrassing number of 'How To Play Jazz Guitar Books', as I'm sure many aspiring jazz guitarists do. Most of these books are either too theory-heavy without any practical application, boring the reader to tears with stuffy, outdated, unnecessary verbiage, and falling into the trap of "talking about music is like dancing about architecture"...or they default to being 'lick' books, most of which are "licks' that I've never heard on a single recording, ever, and which are too loose on the theory, thereby not giving the student any idea how to apply the lick in question; how to either build up to it, or what to do after one plays the lick...or, perhaps most importantly, how to go about constructing one's own licks. In other words, most jazz guitar instructional books are useless.Despite being frustrated by these two faulty approaches, I've always (mistakenly) assumed that this is just the way learning jazz guitar is, given that 99% of the learning materials out there fall into one of these two categories. I figured 'Fundamental Changes in Jazz Guitar' was going to be yet another one of these PLAY LIKE WES MONTGOMERY IN ONLY 30 DAYS!!! snake oil piles of bullpucky. Never in my life have I been so ecstatic at having been proven wrong about a purchase. (note: I'm not saying I can play like Wes...then again, the book doesn't promise that). Everything that other jazz guitar instructional books get WRONG, this book gets RIGHT. Every chapter is laid out in simple, easy-to-digest nuggets, with each chapter logically building off of the previous chapter. There's a touch of theory thrown in, but only to illustrate the SOUND that your fingers are making as you make the various note changes from chapter to chapter. And that's the key difference between this book and 99% of the other jazz guitar instructional books out there, is that it gets you to pay attention to SOUND, and connecting your fingers to that sound.If you're like me, and have been frustratingly & unsuccessfully trying to learn jazz guitar on your own, purchasing this book and running through the exercises is not just the first step, but a huge leap in the right direction. Do not hesitate. Buy it now and get crackin'.

This book covers all the fundamental knowledge required to play great music!Finally, a professional who keeps the theory to a minimum and points out the useful practice and knowledge to get you going…Thanks for sharing!Michel

simple d'approche et efficace, tout ce que j'attendais

I have used many Jazz guitar instruction books and this is one of the very best, particularly if you are new to Jazz guitar. It's written in a friendly, accessible tone and it takes you methodically and logically through the process of playing over chord changes. Every step is explained clearly and, like all the best instruction books, yo feel like the tutor is with you in the room.I was so impressed with this book I bought a couple more in the same series and they are just as good. Highly recommended!

There is no shortcut to jazz guitar. In the end, one needs to be able to compose music on the spot. That’s, as someone said, 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. This book provides a path to perspiration. You’ll have to do the actual workout.The good news is it works.The book is clear, offering insight and a method.Recommended.

This book provides a great introduction into jazz guitar playing. It covers a lot of important techniques and as the title says provides an in depth study. Starting from the essential II-V-I progression it treats things like arpeggios, chromatic passing notes, bebop scale and its combination with arpeggios, tritone substitution etc.. For me this was an ideal tutorial, which gave the necessary systematics, which I was missing before, studying parts from different sources. The audio material is very useful for training the ear and also for getting the ideas presented in the book down from your brain to your fingers. Highly recommendable!