Giving That Blues Jazz Feeling To Your Solos

Tommaso Zillio

When you learn to play guitar some things are easy and some are hard. (Wow, that’s a strong start for this article… don’t worry, it gets better later. I promise.)

The problem that most guitar student have, is that they take this simple fact of life, and make a number of assumptions on this.

For instance, the first assumption is that everything easy is worthless and everything that makes you sound good must be hard. But this is of course not true at all. In fact, there are musical masterpieces out there that are comparatively very easy to play, and there are some hellishly difficult pieces of music that do not sound that good.

It’s important to realize that “good = hard” is just an assumption, because this way you can start by learning the good things that are easy. This way you will sound better faster!

Another assumption guitar students take is that it takes time to sound better. In reality, I have personally seen people learning a few simple tricks in matter of minutes and sounding noticeably better with less than one hour of practice. Yes, I will share one of these tricks below 🙂

And a final assumption is that some music styles are much harder than others to learn and play. For instance I often hear that Jazz is the hardest style to play. Again, this is not true (and remember: harder or simpler do not mean better or worse!), in fact you can start sounding “jazzy” with just a few simple tricks.

Which brings me back to the trick I wanted to share you. If you watch the video below you will learn in few minutes a way to make your playing sounding jazzy (or even bluesy), even if you are a straight rock player.

Will this make you a Jazz player? No. But it will help you play some “faux Jazz” in a pinch. Here’s the video:

As you can see, it’s nothing difficult – whether you are a beginner or an advance player you are able to apply this to anything you can play. Try and experiment what kind of sound you can get out of your guitar… and especially, remember to have fun!

About The Author

Tommaso Zillio is a professional prog rock musician. He also writes a lot about Guitar Music Theory and how to apply it to real-life playing.

You can get a free intro lesson with Josh Beetler, the owner of the Guitar Player School.