How to Play Blues Style Jazz Guitar

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is John Armstrong with expertvillage.com. I am a professional guitar instructor and today we are going to be studying beginning jazz guitar. Okay next I would like to discuss kind of a blues style chord progression using 7 chords. Now this kind of goes outside of what we traditionally see. It is some style progression and it kind of really doesn't follow the rules for major or minor keys in this situation because we are going to do Blues in A but our 1 chord is going to be a 1 dominant 7 chord, followed by a 4 dominant 7 chord and a 5 dominant 7 chord, so we are using 1 dominant 7, 4 dominant 7 and 5 dominant 7 confined within the confines of 12 bars or 12 measures. Normally in a major key you have a 1 major 7 and a 4 major 7 and only your 5 chord would be a dominant 7 but here we are using all dominant chord voicing s and arranging a 1 dominant 7, 4 dominant 7, 5 dominant 7. Endless amounts of possibilities and ways you can arrange these. One real popular way would be something like this. I am going to just be playing 4 to a bar which means 4 strums and be strumming on each beat; 2,3,4, 1, 4, 1, 4 dominant 7, back to 1 dominant 7, 5 dominant 7, 4 dominant 7, 1 and 5. Now what I will do now is try to jazz it up a little bit by sliding in a few more chords; doing some little chromatic walk downs between my 5 and 4 chords too; 2,3,4. "