Logan Young

When most people start out their jazz guitar lessons, everyone’s bright-eyed and excited to be there, but soon the lessons (not to mention practice time) quickly get replaced by life! The objective of this article is to help new players stay motivated to keep on learning their craft even during times when they don’t feel like it.

There are many who say that learning to play jazz guitar is complicated. The different scales, modes and chords can be too much to learn and thus, can easily overwhelm those who are new. Stay out of this train of thought. While there is much to learn, there is a lot of help out there as well, and with practice you’ll soon be playing with confidence.

Let’s face it, we love the idea of seeing and hearing ourselves playing our jazz guitar. We love the music and the tunes, and most of all, we love jazz guitar! Learning to memorize tunes comes with the territory and simply put, we want to recreate that tune in our playing.

Complete scale mastery involves more than just learning how to move your fingers. Music, the kind that moves our soul (and caused us to want to learn to play jazz guitar), involves our eyes, our ears and our mind. Yes, we do have to have technically correct finger positioning and we’ll probably have to practice for hours on end, but when our music is played “in the zone” we have the satisfaction that we’ve played from our heart.