Originally Posted by: RiskyNZAh this is the tutorial that put me off Jazz way back! I'd just learned how to do A/E shape barre chords and had no idea why you would want to mess up a perfectly good and already hard enough to play chord by adding some random note to it![/quote]
LOL. Well, congrats on making it through that stuff & making progress until you were ready for the awkward shapes of jazz! :p

I was going to mention my extended harmony chord tutorials as something you should eventually study! Glad you've already found them. A lot of the reason those are so valuable is of course because of how the voices move from chord to chord. That is the essence of jazz harmony!

Remember, those three-note-per-string mode patterns & major & minor pentatonic boxes are still very useful tools & patterns. It's just that jazz ups the ante due to using those tools in a wider conceptual context. Suddenly, all those shredding patterns are not just ends in themselves! They are tools to use in order to link melody notes & harmonic functions moving from chord to chord in a progression.

Originally Posted by: RiskyNZ
I wanted to have all of those chords and at least a third on the bottom inversion for each chord type before I move onto the drop 2 stuff, just because I figure it makes sense to know the whole chords before you drop tones and do crazy moving bassline things with them?
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Good point. Keep in mind that the Drop 2 stuff will show you the inversions, too. I have a lot of tutorials on inversions on every possible inversion shape across the fretboard, if you need more help with them.

Originally Posted by: RiskyNZ
As for your breakdown, it helped a lot right away thanks Chris! In particular the bit about learning the original melody - I'd never thought to do that because I thought, "hey I'm trying to play Jazz and its all about improvisation so I should be making up the entire melody straight from my head." I think that was the main thing going wrong.[/quote]
Excellent! Glad my explanation helped. It's a common mistake in regards to jazz. And as you discovered, the original melody gives you a "road map".

And you've got the idea of ornamentation: alter the melody using nearby notes, walk between melody notes with chromatic runs, arpeggios outlining the chord progression in the tune, or with jazzy modulated chord progs that approach the chords in the tune.
[QUOTE=RiskyNZ]
The localised ii-V-I thing I tried mainly over the Gmaj7-Cmaj-7 change and it rocked! I started just playing Dm7 - G7 - Cmaj7 to get the sound into my head, then went mainly D Dorian-G mixo-Cmaj7 and it sounded weird but really nice. It kind of didn't make sense but resolved nicely and made sense in retrospect as a result. Its fun to think of it as like a little modulation out of then back into key - which is exactly the kind of sound I was trying to develop. I'll definitely keep busy exploring this concept for a while and coming up with a few ways of doing it.

This is great news! :) I am very happy to hear you've completely understood the concept I was trying to get across & that you've started to apply it successfully. :)

The next step is to look for places to include extended chord tones. For example, instead of Dmin7 - G7, try Dmin7b5 - G7b9! Use D locrian & G harmonic or melodic minor because you would be implying the key of C minor!
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Tomorrow's challenge will be doing something interesting over that chromatic sequence you mentioned, and that I've just been playing a B note over so far.

Try pedal point ideas, use the B as a pedal to return to inbetween chord tones from the descending chord sequence.
[QUOTE=RiskyNZ]
This is pretty well where I feel I'm up to, although I've noticed you never really stop learning step 1.

That's a fact. :) A lot of learning jazz (or any style really well) is constantly building & maintaining your own vocabulary; finding new ways of outlining ii-V-I's, embellishing melodic lines with certain types of ornaments.

HP's jazz tutorials are a great source of licks to add to your library. And never discount the blues as a source of licks to build jazz licks. The best jazz players always have a solid grasp of the blues.

The Joe Pass lead lessons are on the way!