NYC Jazz Guitar Masterclasses

If you were fortunate enough to get to take private jazz guitar lessons with Pat Metheny, what do you think would be the first thing he would ask you to do?

• Arrange a solo guitar chord melody for a jazz standard?

• Transcribe a famous solo?

• Master all of your scales and arpeggios in every position of the fretboard?

• Memorize all inversions of your basic drop 2 chords?

• Read a theory book?

What do you think that Metheny would say is the absolute most important thing to your jazz guitar progress? I'm going to tell you what it is today, and I'm going to attach two PDFs and give you some ideas how you can accomplish it and begin applying it to your music and your playing to start seeing changes immediately and continue watching those changes grow and...

Look! Up in the sky!
It's an octatonic scale!
It's a dyad run!
It's triad pairs!

It's.......

Melodic Triads.

Yep, this whole run started with one simple major triad. But like a seed planted in the ground, watered, and tended to... it's bound to grow into something else.

Here's the basic theory going on that turned a simple A major triad into... that ^^^^

Actually first, let's talk about Bruce Lee for a second. Bruce once said that he's not afraid of a person who's practiced 10,000 different kicks once. He's afraid of a person who's practiced one kick 10,000 times. We'll come back to that in a minute. Let's pick up from the A major triad.

I'm using an A major triad over a C7 chord. There's a lot to cover, so I'm not going to explain too much about that.

I like to add a...