Vintage

On the Challenges of Learning Jazz Guitar

On the piano, middle C is always the same white key near the middle of the keyboard. There's only one place to play that note on the piano. On the guitar, there are three or four different places to play any given note in the same octave. With only a split second to find that note during your solo, which middle-C do you choose?

Blue plays an Epiphone Emperor Regent guitar

The Physical Challenges

On a saxophone or trumpet, you can only play one note at a time. So there's less to learn, flat out. On the piano, you can play chords, but you have ten fingers to do it with. On the guitar you can play chords as well, but you really only have four fingers to play them with (one could use the thumb on the fretboard too, but it's rather uncommon and most find it awkward, except perhaps Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Healey).

Like pianists, guitarists use both hands. But guitarists hands must work together, while piano players can use their two hands in counterpoint. With only four fingers on the fretboard guitarists can play chords with up to six notes, using the six strings on the standard guitar, but to do so they must hold down multiple strings with one finger.

Further complicating matters is the fact that the six strings of the guitar, when in standard tuning, are not all tuned to the same interval. All the strings are a fourth apart except the interval between the third and second strings, which is a major third apart. There's good reason for this, it prevents guitarists from having to contort and stretch their fingers in a painful manner to grab common chord forms. But for the beginning guitarist, it causes much confusion because the layout of the guitar is not uniform which makes it difficult to memorize.

Compare this to the piano where each key is logically one step above the other, and each octave is visually a repeat of the previous octave. Pianists really only have to learn 12 notes. But guitarists have to memorize a fretboard that contains notes that 1) repeat themselves (same note, same octave) in different places of the fretboard and 2) do not "sit" in a uniform pattern as they do on the piano.

So the guitarist can play six notes at a time with only four fingers and both hands working together and there are three to four different places to play each of those notes and they are not laid out in any uniform pattern. Perhaps now you may be getting an idea of just how challenging the guitar is as an instrument. So the next time someone cracks a joke about the guitarist who can't sight read complicated passages, give him a break, please!

The Theoretical Challenges

Other instruments aside, another thing that seems to make learning jazz guitar so daunting for many players is that there is no standard way to learn how to play jazz guitar. Perhaps this is a result of the somewhat illogical physical construction of the guitar, as I've described above. I have a closet full of books on jazz guitar and each one of those books has a remarkably different approach.

There is a benefit to this. These many different approaches to jazz guitar theory has meant that there many wonderful players with completely different styles, which may be a factor not only of their varying personal tastes but also of their varying theoretical approaches to the instrument.

But the lack of a standard method makes it difficult for beginning players to get up to speed on the guitar as quickly as players get up to speed on other instruments.

That's just one example of why learning guitar theory is a very difficult task, but in a way it summarizes the problem of learning the guitar in general. The guitar offers so much freedom that musicians are often overwhelmed by the choice, unable to make a decision fast enough to keep time with the band, especially when sight reading.

And yet, the guitar's physical construction is also very limiting. Both the guitar's freedoms and limitations make it a very challenging, but very rewarding instrument to learn and play.

As someone on the All About Jazz Forum recently wrote, "It would be like someone giving you a type writer and then giving you thousands of books that have completely different views on how to learn how to type. You would never develop a standard set of grips or reference points to flawlessly type words in any useful manner."

It's necessary then to buy or borrow every book out there you can to find those approaches to guitar theory that make sense to you. And these books are not cheap!

Even within books I have found sections that work for me and sections that do not. I'm almost inclined to go back into my library with a pair of scissors and some glue to cut up and reconstruct the perfect jazz guitar theory book custom made for me.

Finding the right teacher is an equally daunting task. It's necessary to find not only a good teacher, but also a teacher who approaches jazz guitar theory in a way that works for you.

All I can say now is, good luck! But don't let this dissuade you from trying to learn jazz guitar. It's a never-ending process and really part of the fun is figuring the complex puzzle that this instrument is. The other part is the joy of playing this beautiful and complex music on such a perfectly designed yet perfectly illogical instrument that when played well just sounds kick-A**!

Blue

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