Truefire Sean McGowan's On Location: Jump Start Jazz Comping

Great jazz rhythm guitar players have command navigating all over the fretboard, have a solid understanding of the harmonic material for the underlying changes, and possess a wide range of tasteful rhythmic approaches -- all of which require a never-ending process of learning, practice and perennial growth.

Filmed in Sean McGowan’s home studio, this Jump-Start Jazz Comping edition of the On Location series focuses on providing students with a “jump-start” vocabulary and approach for jazz guitar comping.

”I’ve designed this course as a jump-start guide for jazz players looking to take their comping skills to the next level. We’ll skip the theory, and focus instead on only the concepts and approaches you need right now -- employing a shape-centric approach for navigating the fretboard and the harmony for many popular jazz-blues tunes and standards, whether you’re playing solo, as a duo, or even with a full band.”

Sean organized this course into six lesson sets. Each set begins with a “Learn and Practice” lesson where he’ll explain key concepts and you’ll work on technical exercises to maximize your jazz comping development. Then, you’ll put your new skills to work over a full-length étude and playalong.

”Throughout the course we’ll focus on creative jazz comping approaches like utilizing “Ladders & T-Shapes”, three and four note voicings, stacked fourths, horizontal block chords, “chord synonyms”, triangle shapes, pianistic approaches, and a ton more. I’ll break everything down for you in detail and you’ll have all of TrueFires learning tools to work with.

I’ve crafted each of the etudes to help you develop your jazz comping approaches over a wide variety of grooves and feels. There’s a rhythm track and etude based on Miles Davis’ So What?, a samba based on the standard “I’ll remember April”, a straight eighth latin style groove based on “Stella by Starlight”, jazz blues grooves, and even a classical sounding jazz etude with lots of counterpoint.”

Sean will explain and demonstrate all of the key concepts and approaches along the way. You’ll get standard notation and tabs for all of the performance studies. Plus, you’ll be able to use TrueFire’s learning tools to sync the tab and notation to the video lesson.

You can also loop or slow down the videos so that you can work with the lessons at your own pace. All of the backing tracks are also included to work with on your own.

Grab your guitar, and let’s “comp” with Sean McGowan!