Gypsy Jazz Chord Resources

Tele295

Half the trick is understanding the substitutions, especially when using the old-style 3-note voicings. An Am6 at the 5th fret (5-x-4-5-x-x) could also be a D7, depending on what the bass player is doing, or the harmonic content of the song. An Am6 at the 10th fret (x-9-10-9-10-x) could also be a D9 or an F#m7b5.

Robin Nolan's books provide good recommendations for chord voicings for each song presented, although you are not bound by them.

Tele295

I was teaching a friend some basic gypsy chords so he could sit in with us on occasion. I boiled it down to about 9 basic shapes (3-4 notes voicings), and tried to come up with as many substitutions as possible. Certainly for more advanced players, you can add in the upper notes of the chord, but these are basic quickie fake book chords.

The fearsome gypsy 13b9 is omitted intentionally. It still scares some people, bt you can substitute a (maj) 6 chord for it, and, in most scenrios, it should get you by.

pickitjohn

Happy New Year

Just saw you could leave a PDF attachment.

I have included the PDF attachment for the "The Developing Jazz Guitarist" mentioned above.

The video's are worth checking out.

ENJOY

pickitjohn

andmer

thanks guys, good stuff!

morricone

Tele295 wrote:

I was teaching a friend some basic gypsy chords so he could sit in with us on occasion. I boiled it down to about 9 basic shapes (3-4 notes voicings), and tried to come up with as many substitutions as possible. Certainly for more advanced players, you can add in the upper notes of the chord, but these are basic quickie fake book chords.

The fearsome gypsy 13b9 is omitted intentionally. It still scares some people, bt you can substitute a (maj) 6 chord for it, and, in most scenrios, it should get you by.

Thanks a lot for that link. I hadn't thought of the m6 / dom7 shape as being a diminished 7 as well.

sksaxgirl

I agree with BluesBop Harry

The Hono Winterstein course is really great.

Mandobart

It's quite a tome, but I just picked up "The Guitar Grimoire: Chord Encyclopedia" by Adam Kadmon from my local music store. A little basic chord theory at the beginning, then over 300 pages of chords laid out by type (major, minor, augmented, diminished, etc.) instead of by letter. Most are movable shapes. Diagrams show the numeric fingering and interval formula. The chords are also shown in standard notation. It contains more information than I will probably ever use or need, but it is the most useful chord book for any fretted instrument I've run across.

pickitjohn

@Mandobart

If you got a song in mind, try this site…

http://www.grilles-manouches.net

Songs have video's, backing, chord Fingerings, and Chart.

You may wish to use Chrome to translate but don't think you will need it.

Here is an example:

pick on
pickitjohn:peace:

Steveareno

Reminds me of the old joke about Rockers playing 3 chords to an audience of 30,000 people and Jazzers play 30,000 chords to an audience of 3 people. As we know, not true and I can' t stand "rockers". But amusing and some what relevant. You can knock yourself out learning too many darn chords and inversions and then find there's a whole bunch of new ones for GJ, but I must say I'm learning more and more (on a selective basis) all the time and I'm an old dude! I try to make it a point to try to learn at least 3 inversions of each chord, so I don't have to jump all over the neck. I Iike it when the bass line automatically does some melody stuff in the bassline with the changes. Whit Smith is good at this and has a couple of YouTube videos. Thanks pickitjohn for posting Leon Grizzard, from Texas. He posts on TDPRI (telecaster discussion pages) in the tabs and tips section. His Western Swing stuff is cool. The first guitar instruction book I got (and still have) by Gene Leis had a quote: "If I don't learn my chords, I will never play enough guitar to be dangerous".
Swang on,