[jazz_guitar] Jazz Guitar Self Study Programs

[v_lamadieu]

I was hoping to get some guidance on some jazz guitar self study
tools. I have been playing guitar for over 15years and would consider
myself a good to average guitar player. Like many guitarist I am
self-taught, but have had the opportunity to study (here and there)
with some very good players in and around the Boston area (including
some Berklee guitarist). I play mostly chordal arrangements that I
have gotten out of books and mostly play fingerstyle/classical and
Wes thumbstyle. (If I could pick like Jimmy Bruno or Pat Martino I
would never use my fingers).

My Current Skill Level & Needs Includes:
1. Reading Music-I can read but really need to improve my guitar,
position site reading abilities. I purchased the Melodic Rhythm book
published by Berklee Press and find it boring and it does not
motivate me...Any recommendations.
2. Scales & Modes-I know my scales & modes. Logically, I start of
with the major scale as the foundation of everything and just add and
subtract notes depending on the tune; my playing mood etc... I have
never taken an overly theoretical approach...Any recommendations on a
good primer would be helpful.
3. Playing Over Changes-I have good ears and have figured out solos
by Wes, Christian, Burrell etc..but I do have problems.FIRST-hearing
the changes and SECOND...Playing over the changes. I do know the
basics i.e. arpegios, color/chord tones etc... But quite frankly at
times I am intimidated by some changes and DON"T KNOW where to begin.
4. Tunes-I own many books i.e. Fake Books; subscribe to Just Jazz
Guitar and can play mostly self contained Chordal Guitar Pieces &
Arrangements such as:
Mi Cosa
In a Sentimental Mood
Birth of the Blues
So What
Monk's Dream
Misty
...I would like to someday be able to play anything that I hear or
see on a piece of sheet music.

Sorry for the long post, but I am new to the group and have already
learned a lot from reading the other post. Any help and or
recommendations would be greatly appreciated.






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[tbel...@comcast.net]

v_lamadieu:

You will get lots of opinions here, so consider mine to be one among these
for your consideration. Since you specified "self study", I assume that you
don't have either the time or inclination, or access to a decent teacher, so
I won't address that.

When doing self-study, there are several factors to consider. One is that
you will probably be going into unfamiliar territory without a guide (i.e.
blind leading the blind), which can result in a lot of false starts and wrong
turns. The remedy to that is to have a proven plan of some kind, one that
you trust will take you where you want/need to go.

Another factor is motivation for the long term. One of the wrong turns I
have made in self-teaching is to spend all my time practicing scales,
arpeggios, etc. and NOT playing music. The activity that keeps me
motivated for the long haul is to see/hear whatever I am learning, turned
into real music. So, I like the idea that everything being learned, be learned
in the context of the songs I want to play.

I have read in this group and elsewhere that you have to LIKE the music
you want to learn. If you are not drawn to jazz such that you seek it out
and are listening to it, maybe you really want to pursue some other form
of playing guitar. There are many offshoots to strictly playing jazz. Do
you want to play songs in a solo guitar style, or comp/solo in a group
situation? What do you want to accomplish? Decide that, and then you
can plot your course to get there. Without a destination, it would be
difficult to set out a plan to achieve it. Actually, I find that to often be the
most difficult part.

My personal recommendation for self-study are the materials offered
by Robert Conti at www.robertconti.com. I have recommended these
materials before, and will continue to do so. Here is why, given in
the context of what I have said so far.

A good teacher will pick some small piece of the subject matter to explore,
and then spend enough time on that subject to make sure you understand it.
Most self-study materials try to cover either too much ground, so that you never
get into anything deep enough to get it, or too little ground so that you don't end
up with anything you can connect to making music. Often, self-study materials
such as books and videos are a disjointed collection of subjects that make it a
huge leap from getting their subject into your hands, to making music with it.
Robert Conti's materials are all geared toward making music. He picks some
subject that, in itself is musically viable, and then explores it in enough detail
to allow you to understand and utilize it in making music.

Conti has several books and videos, each focusing on some aspect of jazz
guitar. He has a book on developing decent picking technique, using specially
prepared excercises from the violin repetoire. He has a book on developing
phrasing for jazz guitar soloing. He has a book that leads you by the hand into
chord melody playing, using a system that garauntees results, and then another
book that gives you a solid foundation for understanding how to create your own
harmonies under the melody. Then, he has several book collections of chord
melody solos of standards, and one of Christmas tunes. These are NOT like
"normal" collections of chord melody material. Instead, he harmonizes every
melody note with a chord so that you have a multitude of possibilities, many
with more than one suggested way of doing it. He tells you to experiment
with these, using arpeggiation, leaving out a chord here and there, etc. In
other words, these collections are interactive where you make informed
choices (assuming you have studied the two books I mentioned on chord
melody).

Conti's videos are very instructive in a similar manner. Each takes a set
of chord changes for a tune and develops a lead solo over it, which he
then leads you through step by step. His method is to give you a vocabulary
wiich you can use in a multitude of situations, and he shows you how that is
done.

If you check out his site, you will find that you select which books and/or videos
you want to work on, and when. In addition, he offers long-distance lessons,
should you decide to pursue that path either instead of, or in conjunction
with your work in his books and videos. In other words, he offers a variety
of ways to achieve your musical goals. The main thing in all this is that his
materials really make sense and are really coherent for the self-learner.

His approach is unique and it works. You will be playing jazz and sounding
decent doing it, while actually playing real songs all the way through the
process. In my opinion, his materials uniquely fulfill all the requirements of
successful self-teaching that I described above.

Tony B

> Yahoo! Groups Links

[Sean Williams]

I agree that you will find many opinions on this
topic.
I would say the biggest thing I have heard from
players like Joe Pass and my latest conversation with
Jonathan Kreisberg is this, learn tunes!
Each tune is like a schematic for improv, chord
melody, reading, etc. Certainly a lot can be gained
from re-harmonizing melodies too.

> My Current Skill Level & Needs Includes:
> 1. Reading Music-

I do find the Leavitt Books helpful but again you
would be killing multiple birds if you read straight
from your fakebooks.

> 2. Scales & Modes-

I have found that going through Jerry Coker's patterns
for Jazz helpful by dividing up the neck in 4 fret
blocks and cycling through the keys, or better yet,
right out your own!
Also, getting the ii - V cadences down in different
keys in those same positions help too. Aebersold has
some play alongs that just focus on cadences that are
also helpful.

> 3. Playing Over Changes
> 4. Tunes

Learning tunes is my goal and a logical path to
gaining some other skills. Right now for me it's
having the discipline to work on these things daily.



Sean Williams
www.gtr4hire.com

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[tbel...@comcast.net]

Sean:

Good points all around. I think that last part about "having the discipline to work
on these things daily" is key, especially when self-teaching where you don't
have the guidance of a teacher and the motivation that comes from having
to show up prepared every week.

Conti's materials are tune-centered, with the few exceptions being his study
of single lines in his one SourceCode book on that subject. However, that
book is in fact essentially tune-centered because he is clearly showing you
in what situations to use what he is teaching.

To me, self-study that is NOT tune-centered is a study that will have difficulty
with motivation, so I agree completely with your comments. I have read some
posts that have said that books such as the Leavitt books might be better
addressed with a teacher. I recommend the Conti materials specifically
because they are geared to self-study, and take into account keeping
you occupied in such a way as to help keep the motivation going.

There are lots of good books and materials around, that's for sure.

Tony B



[good comments removed for space considerations]

>
> Learning tunes is my goal and a logical path to
> gaining some other skills. Right now for me it's
> having the discipline to work on these things daily.
>

[Keith]

I suggest that you check out www.guitarcollege.com Rich Severson
was an instructor at GIT before he developed his lesson plans and he
really knows how to present the material in a way that all can
understand. He has 1 course called Jazz 101 that you could check out
for $20 before you took the plunge into his more detailed study

A second option would be to check out Steve Crowell's 4 year study
available at www.chordmelody.com



Keith

--- In jazz_...@yahoogroups.com, "v_lamadieu" <v_lamadieu@y...>
wrote:

[ottenharp]

on the subject of self study materials, you might like this

http://home.planet.nl/~otten699/jazzexercises.htm

Matt

[tbel...@comcast.net]

Matt:

That looks like an interesting site. I read the pdf, which has the contents of
the package as well as some introductory comments. He says that his
intent is not to do better than the materials already available in the market,
but to give actual licks and phrases so as to get into the mind of somebody
who can already improvise. That sounds like an interesting approach. He
seems to present the material as an adjunct to whatever you may already
be studying.

Thanks for posting the link. I am sure there are people here who can
make good use of that approach.

Tony B

[tbel...@comcast.net]

Hi all:

After thinking more about the idea of self-teaching and the different
approaches that various materials provide, I wanted to comment a
bit more on the Conti materials. I also have a collection of the Guitar
College materials, and can comment a bit on those.

The Conti materials are really geared toward somebody who has had
soe experience playing guitar already. You are at least somewhat
familiar with the fretboard and have some facility with playing at least
basic chords around the fretboard.

In past threads along these lines, some people have commented that
Conti' "Chord Melody Assembly Line" SourceCode book 5 is "paint by
the numbers", and that this is not a particularly good approach. There
seems to be a general consensus that his SourceCode book 4, "The
Formula", is quite good.

The value in Conti's SourceCode book 5 is in the way it helps a person
get started and moving along with chord melody playing. As he says in
that book, he can't know the playing level of each person who acquires
this book. What the book does is to do the equivalent of a teacher walking
a student through creating a chord melody arrangement from a fakebook.

Conti's approach is to "eliminate all possibility for confusion by having
a single solution for each problem he presents" (quoted from the book).
So, if you are given a particular melody note and told to harmonize it
with a particular type of chord, you will readily have a solution literally
in hand. The book gives you a way to harmonize the C entire major
scale (plus some other notes) using C major, F major, Dmi7, etc, to
cover the whole key of C. Contrast that with simply knowing the
harmonized major scale, where you have the familiar pattern of
major, minor, and diminished chords. It is then up to you to transpose
this to the other keys. He makes the process painless, and the
memorization comes (as with any of his books) through using the
material to play real songs in fakebooks.

Now, that description certainly does describe "paint by the numbers",
and would be limiting if that is all Conti provides. However, he says
quite clearly that this is a first step to get you moving forward. As
you gain facility wth this approach, you will dive into SourceCode
book 4, and get a lot more out of it. In that book, he opens up the
whole world of harmony in a way that it becomes a natural
progression from the preparatory work done in book 5.

Then, you move on to SourceCode book 3 "Intros, Endings, and
Turnarounds", and start adding those ideas to your repetoire.
Along the way, you start to become an altogether decent chord
melody player, and all the while you were playing real tunes from
fakebooks, building repetoire while developing your own vocabulary.

SourceCode books 1 and 2 deal with single lines. One is intended to
build your technique using violin etudes setup specifically for developing
technique on the guitar, and the other teaches you how to generate
interesting single line phrases and apply them in a variety of situations.
Again, in the books Conti explains what you are to do, what the intended
purpose is, and gives you a sesne of how to move along through the book
in terms of what it means to "know" material before moving on to the next
idea.

In each of his videos, Conti will take a chord progression to a tune and
play a solo over it. The rest of the video will then take this solo apart
phrase by phrase, show you how to play it, and then how to use the
individual phrases to build a vocabulary that can be used in a variety
of settings, much as he does in his book on Jazz Lines. I have one or
two of his VHS tapes, but have not yet acquired any of his DVDs, though
I would assume they are along similar lines.

Throughout all of these books and videos, there are two things that Conti
does that (in my opinion) differentiate him from many other materials in
the same market space:

1. He makes sure each step of the way that you understand what you are
to do, how to know when it is time to move on to the next idea (very important
to the self-teacher), and then how to move on applying the ideas you learned.
2. He takes one, very practical (musically useful) concept at a time, and makes
sure you understand it and can use it to make music, instead of dumping a
whole bunch of stuff on you and leaving you to try to figure out what to do with
it and how to really learn it.

A good contrast between Conti's materials and those of Guitar College is that
Conti's materials are entirely experiential, with the real learning being done
by playing through it all. Guitar College's materials are really much like
going to school to learn guitar. There is a healthy combination of theory
and application, printed materials and CDs. The idea is to listen to the
CD and follow along with the book. A single book will have 6 CDs with
it, so there is certainly a lot of guidance.

Guitar College is an excellent choice for the self-learner. The approach
is different from Conti's, and is probably better for somebody starting
from scratch, though experienced players can drop into whatever they
feel like learning. There is a course that consists of audio CDs designed
to teach you music theory in the car while driving to and from work. These
give some written assignments such as writing out all the major scales on
paper using the "template" for the major scale as a guide (after Rich
thoroughly explains the process on the CDs, fo course). He explains
the theory you need to know to build scales and chords, understand
chordal relationships, etc, as well as providing ear trainging to hear
intervals.

There are a lot of book/CD combinations in the form that is directly
analogous to being in a classroom. This is heavy duty stuff for the
serious musician. If you are a working adult who would like to "drop
out" of your life for a year or two or three and go to a music school
such as GIT or Berklee, but can't, this is an ideal approach. This is
a much longer term commitment, in a sense, then is the Conti material.
Obviously, in either case, there is a lifetime of work. The difference is
that Conti's materials are quite focused on specific aspects of playing
jazz guitar, and it is not difficult to stay motivated long enough to get
through them. Guitar College's mateerials are similar to going to a
trade school to learn to play guitar, and therefore cover a lot of bases
from blues to rock to country to jazz, and all starting with a solid basic
musical education.

Rich Severson is a very sincere guy. His low-key approach is relaxing,
yet amazingly thorough. He gets across quite clearly what he wants you
to do and how to go about it. He is responsive if you email him, since
his intention is to maintain a degree of interactiveness throughout your
studies.

There is no comparison between these courses because they are intended
for different audiences, though both are geared to the self-teacher.

The Conti materials are very, very good if you want to become proficient at
playing jazz guitar. They provided a means of getting you off to a solid start
and equipping you to continue a lifetime of self-directed learning. Results
will become visible sooner using the Conti materials, but then, the assumption
is that you already have some degree of proficiency with the guitar. His
materials will take you from a basic level of playing into a solid player,
make no mistake about that. I highly recommend them.

The Guitar College materials are for those who specifically wanted to go
to guitar school and get a broad base education across a variety of guitar
styles. The direction is clear and the combination of written and audio
material will get sure results for the learner who is capable of being
self-motivated on all this material for a long time. You can drop into,
say, his blues or fingerstyle course, and just do that. However, the
real learning comes from making a long term commitment and going
the whole nine yards. If you decide to do that, Rich offers a number
of special priced combinations of courses, with the "Serious Student"
being the comprehensive one.

In the long run, I think the Conti and Guitar College materials can
actually complement each other. You can either start with the Conti
materials and become proficient in jazz, and later decide to fill in
a lot of foundation elsewhere with Guitar College (as I have been
doing), or start with Guitar College and then go the extra mile with
Conti's materials.

I got the Conti materials first, and later started working with the Guitar
College materials. I am happy with the way that worked out. I will
continue to work through the Conti materials regardless of what else
I am doing, because they are so rich with information and a refresher
is always valuable. If I had to pick just one set of materials to purchase,
it would be the Conti materials because they have worked well for me
and fit my interests well. Fortunately, I was able to swing both (several
years apart, of course).

In self-teaching, motivation and maintaining a sense of direction become
the task of the learner, without any help from a real, live teacher. In my
personal experience, it is easier to mainitain motivation throughout
working with the Conti materials than with the Guitar College materials.
The reason is that the Guitar College materials are much more dense,
have many more excercises, and the ratio of playing excercises to
playing songs is much less than that of the Conti materials. This is
not a flaw in the Guitar College materials. If you go to college to learn
to become proficient as a guitarist, you would expect to find the same
mix.

However, you need to be aware of this factor, because either set of
materials will cost you some serious money and you need to be sure
the commitment to get through it is there. With the Conti materials,
you don't study a lot of theory and, outside of the etudes for violin
(which are actually music too), you are really playing jazz in the
form of single line solos and chord melody. It is easier to stay
motivated learning while making music than while slogging through
a lot of excercises and theory. The tradeoff is that, if you want to
study theory intensively and broaden your scope to country, blues,
and such, then you will be looking for material outside the scope of
the Conti materials, should you choose to go that route. But that
is really one of the real strengths of the Conti approach. He is
very focused and clears a path for you to get directly to where he
wants to take you, should you choose to go there.

In closing, I would definitely say that having a cohesive set of materials
to work from is, at least for me, far more effective than the odd book here
and there. The other books I have collected over the years are, in my
opinion, adjuncts to the core study materials provide by Robert Conti,
and later, Rich Severson. Both guys are excellent players and teachers.
That is somewhat unusual. More often, great players don't make great
teachers, and great teachers probably would not be building playing
careers for themselves. Obviously, Howard Robets comes immediately
to mind as an excpetion, and there are several others. But in general,
this seems to be true. Both Robert Conti and Rich Severson are great
players and teachers. I hope this post gave a flavor of what these
courses are about.

Tony B

[Chris Smart]

Another option... check out a couple cdrom's from PG Music
www.pgmusic.com
It's called Jazz Guitar Masterclass. the instructor is Oliver
Gannon. The first disc alone is some sixty plus lessons, along
with exercises, backing tracks for practicing, etc. You learn
tunes as well, but for copyright reasons, these have slightly
different names and melodies from some popular jazz standards.

Chris

[Ando]

Excellent post, Tony B. Much appreciated.

Cheers,
Ando

[John Amato]

Yes --- I have these CDs from PGM -- they are very
good --- they are a bit high level -- you have to have
somewhat jazz chord knowledge - it's really not
begiiner level -- but it's good for the visual aspect
of seeing the teacher's hand on the fretbaord -- that
gives a good sense of perspective and beginning point
..

-- Chris Smart <chr...@sympatico.ca> wrote:

> Another option... check out a couple cdrom's from PG
> Music
> www.pgmusic.com
> It's called Jazz Guitar Masterclass. the instructor
> is Oliver
> Gannon. The first disc alone is some sixty plus
> lessons, along
> with exercises, backing tracks for practicing, etc.
> You learn
> tunes as well, but for copyright reasons, these have
> slightly
> different names and melodies from some popular jazz
> standards.
>
> Chris
>
>

Thanking You In Advance,
John Amato
Isa.55:11
201-348-5142

"All that is necessary for the triumph
of evil is that good men do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke

__________________________________________________
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[tbel...@comcast.net]

Ando:

Thanks. I am glad the post was useful. I try to come at this from the
perspective of the real issues self-teachers will encounter. The big
issue really is whether, after spending the money, is the product
REALLY useful on a day-to-day basis and why.

I remember hearing that it was how vitamins were packaged that
determined how well the human body could assimilate them. All
the various vitamin products had essentially the same vitamins,
but some were more easily assimilated than others, making them
more useful for the inntended purpose. I think the same consideration
goes for self-teaching methods. Both methods I talked about are
excellent, but are intended for different audiences.

Tony B

> Excellent post, Tony B. Much appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
> Ando
>

[billk_york]

--- In jazz_...@yahoogroups.com, tbeltrans@c... wrote:

Tony,
I get that you saying start with number 5 and work back to number
one? So, that would indicate that these books are not progressive
from vol. 1 to vol. 5, but actually the other way around. Is that
what I should get from your post?

Bill

> Hi all:

> The value in Conti's SourceCode book 5 is in the way it helps a

person...Get started and moving along with chord melody playing.
As

> you gain facility wth this approach, you will dive into SourceCode
> book 4, and get a lot more out of it. In that book, he opens up
the
> whole world of harmony in a way that it becomes a natural
> progression from the preparatory work done in book 5.
>
> Then, you move on to SourceCode book 3 "Intros, Endings, and
> Turnarounds", and start adding those ideas to your repetoire.
> Along the way, you start to become an altogether decent chord
> melody player, and all the while you were playing real tunes from
> fakebooks, building repetoire while developing your own vocabulary.
>
> SourceCode books 1 and 2 deal with single lines. One is intended
to
> build your technique using violin etudes setup specifically for
developing
> technique on the guitar, and the other teaches you how to generate
> interesting single line phrases and apply them in a variety of
situations.
>

[tbel...@comcast.net]

Bill:

If you intend to study chord melody and want to dive into book 4, then
you might consider book 5. The other books have nothing to do with
what book 5 teaches. Books 4 and 5 deal specifically with chord
melody. I suspect that Conti came out with book 4 first, and later
decided that an introductory text might be helpful. The other books
are not in any particular order because they don't need to be.

Tony B

> --- In jazz_...@yahoogroups.com, tbeltrans@c... wrote:
>
> Tony,
> I get that you saying start with number 5 and work back to number
> one? So, that would indicate that these books are not progressive
> from vol. 1 to vol. 5, but actually the other way around. Is that
> what I should get from your post?
>
> Bill
>

[Bill Williams]

A very thorough and fair account of the Conti and Guitar College approaches,
Tony.
I've really learnt a lot from the Conti stuff and have also been impressed
by the GC materials I've seen, although I haven't had time to work through
them.
>I have one or two of his (Conti's) VHS tapes, but have not yet acquired

any of his DVDs, though
> I would assume they are along similar lines.

They are indeed, with the additional benefit that they make good use of the
DVD medium and so it's easy to find and replay each bar or 2-bar segment. It
's also nice that he will supply midi files on request for the solos he
analyses so you can slow them down, change key (his Blues for Alice study is
in C so it's nice to be able to transpose and print out in F) etc.
Bill Williams



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

[joe_jazz_2000]

Thanks to Tony B for the thoughtful comparison of the Conti and
Guitar College materials. I learned of the Conti materials here and
in JJG and got the Assembly Line book, and although I was able to
use and categorize the chord forms for chord melody, the paint-by-
number approach didn't suit me. After reading your critique, I am
going to try Book 4 and some of the linear studies.

I don't have anything as comprehensive as these two sets of study
materials to recommend, but judging by the poster's description of
his own strengths and weaknesses, I believe he would benefit from
studying Patterns, Scales & Modes For Jazz Guitar by Arnie Berle.
It's my scale Bible, covering five major scale forms, related
modes, ii-Vs, neighbor tones, and playing lines through the cycle of
fourths. It gets you all over the board and helps you visualize the
scales, overlaid chords and starts you on playing over changes. This
book got me out of my favorite-scale box. A good permanent reference
for any guitar student's library.

Once the five (or six, per Jimmy Bruno)major scale forms are
mastered, the ii-Vs from Aerbersold Vol 2, or the lines from other
books of linear studies can applied to each of the five scale forms.
A good way to master the fingerboard, I think. I've used lines from
the Bert Ligon book, Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony, in each
scale form and have benefited greatly.

[JoePass]

Joe....I use both Conti's and Bruno's approaches....and they are
diametrically opposed to each other....Jimmy stresses
scales/arpeggios.....Conti says to never practice them. Both
approaches have merit. I'm thinking about starting a correspondence
course with Conti.

John



-- In jazz_...@yahoogroups.com, "joe_jazz_2000" <joejazz2000@o...>
wrote:

[tbel...@comcast.net]

Joe:

Thanks for the kind comments. In the big picture regarding Conti's
materials, the "paint by numbers" approach of book 5 will get a
person dealing with harmonizing a melody note, and putting
together a chord melody solo. That "breaks the ice", and gives
a person confidence to go further exploring, which is where
book 4 comes in. More often than not, the hardest thing is
getting started. Once the process is demonstrated, there is
a lot learned on many levels that a book thick with words
could not do justice with. That is why I say that Conti's
materials are experiential. Instead of a lot of words, he
has you playing music and experiencing for yourself how
this stuff works. But, he does it in such a way that doing
so makes musical sense, instead of playing through a lot
of pre-arranged chord melody solos and hoping you are
somehow to distill the information from that. It is not
particularly easy to describe the process, but it does work.
You get an innate sense of how to work with harmony, rather
than a head full of memorized formulas.

The books you mentioned are definitely good. There are many
good books around, and I have bought many as people here
have recommended them. There is certainly no one way to
approach learning to play guitar, and everybody's recommendations
provide new angles to tackle it from.

Tony B

[Gregg Ellis]

John,
Does your new guitar have "Made in Japan" on it antwhere?

John Amato <jama...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Yes --- I have these CDs from PGM -- they are very
good --- they are a bit high level -- you have to have
somewhat jazz chord knowledge - it's really not
begiiner level -- but it's good for the visual aspect
of seeing the teacher's hand on the fretbaord -- that
gives a good sense of perspective and beginning point
..

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