Master Jazz

Chapter 1: Introduction & Overview 5
Chapter 1: Introduction & Overview
Welcome to Master Jazz Guitar Solos
The
Master Jazz Guitar Solos
program is a fully-featured interactive music
program with professional jazz quartet/quintet arrangements of 50 songs. Each
song features a jazz guitar solo played by a top studio musician, as well as
accompanying piano (comping), bass, drums, and strings. There are almost 5
hours of jazz guitar soloing in this program.
Learn how to solo like a master!
This program is an interactive learning aid, designed to help you learn to solo like
a professional jazz guitarist. Musicians studying improvisation typically learn by
copying other soloists' performances. Since guitar is a "visual instrument", it is
easier to learn to play by watching the fretboard than by reading the music from a
staff. The on-screen guitar fretboard shows you exactly which notes and chords
are being played on the guitar. There are guide notes for typical positions for the
key, and note names, to help you learn the fret/string positions.
The purpose of this program is to help you to learn the art of jazz improvisation.
The student who wants to lean to improvise jazz music is usually told to listen to
some jazz solos, and learn from them.
Unfortunately, the student often encounters some obstacles after receiving this
advice.
! There aren't a lot of jazz solos available in written form. The few books
available may have transcriptions of solos from records out of print, or hard
to obtain, so the student is unable to hear what the solos are supposed to
sound like.
! Many solos that are written out are of very advanced material, beyond the
playing ability of the student. For example, the student may struggle to learn
16 bars of a complex John Coltrane solo based on a modal scale, but finds it
difficult to widely apply this information to more mainstream jazz songs with
typical chord progressions.
We have created a program that has a huge library of jazz solos, based on the
following parameters:
! All of these solos are "mainstream" playing, based on typical chord
progressions.
! Most of the soloing uses eighth notes, or triplets, so it is playable by most
musicians.
! Each song contains 6 full choruses of music. The first 3 choruses of the song
are either played in the Phrygian Position (3rd of the scale on the lowest
string), then the next 3 choruses are played in the Aeolian Position (6th of the