Blog Three Columns

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to hold the pick like Gypsy guitarists do to get the greatest sound when playing jazz!

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to make your playing more swinging and groovy. It’s about a special ornament, adding a ghost note on an open string just before the note you’re playing.

In this lesson I will show you how to improve your improvisation by basing it on the structure of the melody. I'll walk you through this method over Blues for Ike and over Coquette.

In this video, I show you how paying attention to the harmonic movement, direction and energy of a song transforms your solos into beautiful music. Make your jazz improvisation very melodic, rather than just playing ascending and descending arpeggios all the time.

In this lesson, we’ll learn the beautiful ballad, Django’s Castle (Manoir de Mes Rêves), by Django Reinhardt. We’ll start from the basics so everyone can follow and move on to more advanced topics – melody, harmony, chord melody, tips for improvisation and practical, yet exciting, advanced musical ideas that you’ll learn to implement right away

The triad improvisation method allows you to simply improvise over any note you like, chromatically and diatonically in a simple and fun way, by visualizing and mastering the three shapes of triads all over your fingerboard. Than you can play around the triad notes to get all the other notes that you want.

The first phrase of Django’s Tiger is so beautiful that I just had to understand it. It makes it easier to see it over the following chord shape:

A lot of new guitarists in the Gypsy Jazz genre have the same dilemma: Should I learn the Rest-Stroke picking method (The Gypsy traditional picking technique) or not?

In this lesson, we will learn how to improvise with the half dim arpeggio over the dominant chord to get the 7add9 sound.

In this lesson, I will talk about the Gypsy Jazz accompaniment, La Pompe, and about a very important and interesting question I got from one of the students of my La Pompe course.

Some songs have so many chords that change so fast that it's very hard to improvise over them. You find yourself just running after the chords and after the form of the songs. Maybe you can follow the form and you can play the "right" notes over each chord, but then you lack creativity in your improvisation because you are concentrating so hard on playing the "right" notes that you forget about being musical…

Let's talk about your chord  playing and about your chord vocabulary.   But , before we start, what are chords? A better answer, for our needs, than the basic definition of a chord as a set of (at least) three notes played together, would be to think of chords more as a suggestion, a code, an invitation to explore and create various sounds.