Chord Of The Week 2/1/16 TWINKLEJAZZ1 - Jazz Imaj7 3rd & 7th chord frags

bigjonbigjon Frets: 680
edited January 2016 in Technique
NEW SERIES - TWINKLE JAZZ 1
I'm going to build a solo jazz chord-melody arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star from the ground up, gradually introducing more complex extensions and substitutions as we go. The key will be Cmajor, to keep the theory easy to follow. Video at the bottom of this post.

Today we'll look at the first chord and last chord, which is a Cmajor, the I chord (tonic) and the melody note is middle C in both cases. On the video I play a basic C power chord x355xx, with the melody note C on the 3rd string, the bass note C on the 5th string and the 5th note of the C major scale (a G) on the 4th string. Doesn't sound very jazzy at all, but that's what I played before I'd got this series planned out! Let's improve on it. . .

Initially we'll always ignore the bass note and the melody note. If we were playing in a group the bassist and melody instrument would be taking care of those in any case, so our job would just be to define the harmony above the bass note. We'll put them back in later to complete our solo jazz guitar arrangement.

The key to getting a chord to sound jazzy is to ignore the 5th and focus instead on the 3rd and 7th. The 3rd of the C major scale is note E (4th string 2nd fret) and the 7th of the C major scale is note B (3rd string 4th fret). For solo jazz arrangements I recommend mostly putting the 3rd and 7th onto strings 3 & 4, to leave strings 1&2 clear for jazzy extensions and melody notes, and leaving strings 5 & 6 clear for bass notes. So our 3rd & 7th partial chord for Imaj7 chords is:
Imaj7 - Cmaj7(no root): xx24xx or xx99xx

I put the alternative of xx99xx in there because it's always good to have two versions of this chord up your sleeve, one with the 3rd on the 4th string & the 7th on the 3rd string, and the other with those two notes reversed, so the 7th is on the 4th string and the 3rd is on the 3rd string. This will help going smoothly from one chord to the next, as you'll see in future weeks.

Finally let's put the bass note of C back in (5th string 3rd fret) and the melody note of C as well (2nd string 1st fret). This gives us a Cmaj7 chord to start and finish the arrangement (sorry I didn't include it in the video!)
Cmaj7: x3241x

The video of me playing a 30-second arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is at
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