Joe Pass Guitar Chords: Guitar Book

Pass organizes chord forms by their sonic character rather than fingering mechanics, which trains your ear alongside your hands. Seeing seventh, augmented, minor, and diminished chords grouped by family rather than by position teaches you to hear relationships between sounds, a crucial shift from purely technical practice.

Moving through these pages feels like learning a language of color and tension. Each category deepens your sense of how a chord sits in musical space, and the substitutions open new paths through familiar harmonic territory.

Intermediate to advanced jazz guitarists ready to move beyond single-position shapes and understand how chords function by their harmonic flavor. Musicians preparing for jazz comping, ensemble playing, or solo improvisation will find this especially valuable for building substitution vocabulary.

• Play through each chord category slowly and listen for the color of the sound before moving to substitutions. Recognize diminished as tense and unstable, seventh as bluesy and unresolved, and augmented as suspended and ambiguous.
• Work the chord substitutions in real time over a backing track or metronome. The goal is hearing which substitutions sound natural in context and which create deliberate tension.
• Practice voice leading between forms in the same category. Notice how different voicings of the same chord type can smooth transitions across progressions.
• Sing the chord tones before you play them. This builds the internal reference you need when substituting chords by ear in an ensemble setting.

Use this as a daily reference during the preparation phase of ensemble rehearsals to sharpen your comping choices, or recommend it to students developing jazz guitar technique outside the group setting. The chord substitution section is particularly useful when arranging standards or learning jazz repertoire that demands harmonic flexibility.

• Recognizing and voicing chords by harmonic function and color
• Understanding chord substitutions within harmonic families
• Reading and executing extended chord forms across the fretboard
• Distinguishing sonic qualities of major, seventh, augmented, minor, diminished, and minor-seventh flat fifth chords
• Building harmonic vocabulary for jazz comping and improvisation