Description
Continuing on with jazz guitar in the style of the great Joe Pass!
We are learning here to orchestrate on the guitar; to simultaneously play or suggest more than one part at a time. This style of playing is called playing chords using Drop 2 Voicings. This is because if you "drop" or avoid playing the second chord voice you can more clearly separate and hear the distance and distinguish between the bass note and the upper register notes of a chord.
This also makes it possible to make a moving bass line with the low notes and an upper voice motion with chord inversions!
Notice in the tab we have two distinct, separate parts: a walking bass line & two higher pitched notes that complete the chord voicing on the G & B strings. Start by simply playing the bass line. Once you get a handle on it then slowly add the other notes on the G & B strings that complete the chord voicing.
You can play with a pick or your fingers of your picking hand.
If you choose a pick, play the bass note as a down stroke, then cross over the strings, then play the open string notes as an upstroke, then cross over the strings in order to get back in position to play the next bass note as a down stroke. Repeat!
If you choose to play with your fingers use your thumb for the bass notes & pluck the open string notes with your index & middle fingers.
The idea is that even though we are only playing ONE chord (in this case a C7) we give the music some MOTION. We accomplish this by playing inversions of the chord & playing a walking bass line along with the chord voicings.
You can, of course, then move the same idea around to play chords other than just C7 also! In order to build up to playing a stereotypical Blues In C like Joe Pass might do, we need to move this idea of walking the C7 around to an F7 as a IV chord and a G7 as a V chord. That will give us all three I-IV-V chords we will require for building up to playing a blues!
Lesson Info
