I have about 26 days until classes start at USF. I will be most likely be majoring in Jazz studies. I play guitar.

Basically, I have about a month until school starts. What should I be learning in order to prepare myself for school, and more specifically my impending audition? I feel sightreading is my least developed skill, so I've been sightreading as many jazz standards as I can. I read though 12 of them today even.

Any suggestions on things to work on? Even lists of things really.

Well, you're not going to move the earth or anything in that amount of time but I can think of a couple good moves.

For sightreading:
It's good that you want to be a better reader (guitarists are notorious for being terrible readers). Reading standards out of the fake book is a solid start that will give you a handle on not-too-complex stuff. For endurance reading I have a couple Bach books (15 two-part inventions for piano and another one of sonatas and partitas for violin/piano). For syncopation I've used a Lenny Neuhas (?) book of bebop-style saxophone duets. I've also got another book called contemporary rhythms for saxophone or something (it's one of those Berklee Press books) which is the hardest reading I've ever seen. Basically any sheet music you can get your hands on is good as long as it isn't specifically for guitar (i.e. covered in fingerings and whatnot).

For jazz in general:
If you're serious about jazz you have enough time to do one or two transcriptions before school starts. If you're new to jazz (and I'm not saying that you are or anything) this would give you a good start on the vocabulary.

Does your school offer both jazz and legit programs, and if so do you have to pass an audition to be able to take the jazz courses? How's your improvising and what tune are you going to play at the audition?

edit - I'll just add that in my experience sight-reading is not going to be a dealbreaker if you're going for jazz. IMO poor reading skills are the result of learning/being taught wrong and if you want to be a real pro you're going to need to have them, but jazz is about how we improvise together. If you're a strong soloist and a weak reader I wouldn't sweat the audition too much.

Thanks for the response, and sorry for the long read One of my high school band directors was really into jazz, and after talking to him about it he gave me a cd that has something like 10 different jazz real books, along with a master index that covers all of them. Basically, I've got a ridiculous amount of sheet music to choose from.

What do you mean by not made for guitar? I think you mean something that's not just the chord markings with rhythm slashes, but I might be wrong. The stuff I've been looking at is either lead sheets with the melody and chords or in rare cases a full score of the tune, so i should be alright. As of now I'm fairly competent with reading music, from the lists of standards I've been going through I've only really tripped up on some of the faster songs.

Transcription-wise, I learned Miles' solo from this recording of so what this summer. I'd looked at learning Charlie Rouse's solo from 'Round Midnight, but gave up on it after a few bars. I'll get back to work on that. I know it will help me in the long term, at least.

USF has a good school of music. For undergraduate majors they have a BA, a BM, and then BMs in music performance, composition, electronic music, and 'jazz studies and composition', which I'm hoping to do. Every music major has to pass an audition, which is held during the spring. I didn't know which school I would be going to, so I missed the date. However, I'm taking lessons with the jazz guitar professor, and he said that I'd be able to audition when school starts. Right now he's got me focusing on reading music and learning seemingly endless amounts of chord-scales.

I just mean avoid music that has guitar fingerings written in (the little number that tells you what finger to use and the number in the circle that tells you what string to play on). I always find that I end up reading the fingerings and not the notes which defeats the point of the excercise.

Do you use a slow-down program for transcriptions? I found that to be a big help with stuff that has a lot of notes.

No, actually, which might be why I had so much trouble learning the Round Midnight solo. Know of anything free?


My teacher says he wants me to learn a bunch of tunes for the next two weeks. I guess that will be the first thing I work on.

I use transcribe (http://www.seventhstring.com/). It's only free for a month, and they've jacked the price up from $10 to $50, but hey, you only have a month. What tunes are you going to learn?

Not too related to songs you should learn, but whenever i don't read much, i pick up a standard in the fake book and transcribe chord voicings to a staff. Playing the mind guitar if you will. i see the chord name (Ex: Gmaj9#11) and I know this chord uses G B D F# C#. and one of the voicings i like for this one is
G C# D F# B so i just write that down on the staff with the corresponding octaves.

it really helps to keep your chord/staff/fretboard knowledge in shape in one useful exercise.

plus, you can always work on these standards forcing yourself to voice-lead the chord changes. but that's a story for another day!

I don't consider a tune really learned until I can play both the chords and the melody together with as many of the chords as I can fit in. Since the original post, I've learned Stella by Starlight, Days of Wine and Roses, and the Mars Volta's Asilos Magdalena just for kicks. Beyond that, I've been reading as many standards as my brain can seem to stand.

I tried the seventhstring program, and it really does help. Thanks for the pointer, although the actual link was broken The only problem is about 45 seconds into the Charlie Rouse solo he starts doing some "saxophone-play-a-whole-lot-of-fast-notes-together" things that sound kind of like slurping noises when slowed down

What I really am looking for though are songs that are tricky. Most of the songs that are just too hard for me are that way because they have a lot of notes and invariably end up being uptempo swing or in cut-time. I need some songs that are difficult because they are rhythmically complex. That's one area I haven't worked on much, and i don't know any songs that showcase this.
As for new songs to learn, I was thinking about doing "Invitation". I work most of the day tomorrow, so I'll hold off working on it in favor of improvising with the time I have.

@ Seb: I haven't gotten to trying your exercise yet, but I'll try it to Autumn Leaves tomorrow night. Do you do that all mentally or literally write out the chords on staff paper? I'm planning on the later, though I might misunderstand.

Also @Seb: I was in Orlando today and was able to try out a few guitars. I was originally eying the Ibanez AG95, and I was able to try out a similar AG guitar and I didn't like it at all. The Epi 'Dot' was pretty craptastic too. Anyway, I took part of your advice and tried out the Sheraton II and the Imperial Regent and loved them both. I'll hopefully be picking up the Sheraton and a case for a little over $700 US.


And as an anecdote, during orientation I went to the school of music to check the audition requirements to get into a jazz ensemble. This is separate from auditioning to get into the program; the school has a bunch of ensembles that represent just about every style of music. Anyway, the audition materials were in a bunch of labeled folders that were sitting out in the main office. I made my way to the folder entitled "Jazz" and opened it to reveal its contents. Low and Behold!- the folder was stuffed with blank pieces of printing paper. It made me laugh and curse under my breath at the same time.

well, i pick out a standard, like the other day i picked 'lester' by wayne shorter. the song starts with a Dm7b5 chord. so mentally, i pick a voicing that could work. and then write it out on the staff. this way i keep the following skills fresh
a) remembering what intervals a chord is made of
b) remembering what intervals i can leave out to make the chord playable
c) remembering where each note is on the fretboard.
d) working the inversions.
e) making a huge link between the fretboard and the staff.
f) easily spotting triad inversions when i have to do slash chords.

and a bunch of other things. it's really stupid. but in the few weeks i've been doing it, it works.

it all depends if you want a block guitar or a real jazz box. if you get a real jazzbox, go for a spruce top. but i think the emperor regent has spruce iirc.

Ha ha, right on.