Sid Jacobs

A quick Soundslice lesson from Sid Jacobs for learning "Maria" from West Side Story on guitar. The interactive notation lets you loop, slow down, and study the tune at your own pace. Included with…

Sid Jacobs explores the musical fundamentals that seem simple but are powerful: voice leading, counterpoint, and moving voices, applied to real tunes on solo guitar. The title comes from his close…

Sid Jacobs explores the double harmonic scale — also called the Byzantine scale — as a way to expand your improvisation vocabulary for modal playing. Though it may be foreign to some ears, it's a…

Sid Jacobs leads this 6-week course — part one of a multi-part exploration into the process of making music, creativity, and the tools we can use to play with the 12 notes we are given. The work…

Jazz guitarist Sid Jacobs teaches a live workshop on chord melody playing, recorded in Tucson. Rather than relying on memorized arrangements, block chords, and grip-based voicings, Sid deconstructs…

How do you sound “outside” when you’re still playing inside the tonality? This is the question that Sid Jacobs answers in his latest master class. In this info-packed video, you’ll discover: Modern…

Sid Jacobs shows how to actually apply the Jimmy Wyble etudes to real tunes, using two contrasting compositions: Blue Bossa , a jam-session staple, and Danny Boy , a beautiful melodic ballad…

Sid Jacobs breaks down Jimmy Wyble's Etude #10 (To Scott Joplin) , walking through the etude phrase by phrase and pulling out the voicings and moves worth stealing for your own playing. The class…

Sid Jacobs shares his personal takeaways from exploring Jimmy Wyble's Etude #5 — his fingerings, how the voices move to address the harmony while creating strong contrapuntal melodic phrases…

Sid Jacobs dissects the Gershwin tune It Ain't Necessarily So , from Porgy and Bess , and builds his solo guitar arrangement from the ground up. Rather than simply stacking a chord voicing under…

Sid Jacobs teaches his solo guitar arrangement of " You Stepped Out of a Dream " — the 1940 standard that became the theme song of actress Lana Turner, often played when she made a dramatic entrance…

Sid Jacobs takes apart Jimmy Wyble's Etude #2 measure by measure, showing how each bar of this 14-bar piece becomes contrapuntal vocabulary you can apply to other tunes. Jimmy Wyble's two-part…

Sid Jacobs teaches Jimmy Wyble's Etude #1 , using it as a launchpad into two-part, contrapuntal guitar playing. Wyble's contrapuntal style has influenced greats like Howard Alden, Larry Koonse…

Sid Jacobs demonstrates how he uses triad pairs — two adjacent triads with no shared notes — to create strong, dramatic intervallic lines. A companion to his class on fourths, this session focuses…

Sid Jacobs shares his approach to intervallic soloing using 4ths — a way to break out of predictable scalar, bebop, and arpeggio-based lines and express beautiful modal sounds. Sid demonstrates how…

Sid Jacobs continues his Christmas tunes series with this relaxed 1-hour-37-minute masterclass, working through more holiday songs and then applying the same chord-melody concepts to well-known…

Sid Jacobs improvises and breaks down eight well-known Christmas songs, using them to demonstrate melody-first arranging, counter melodies, and voice leading in an easy-to-understand way. Sid's…

In this 2006 masterclass, Sid Jacobs shows how to start using counterpoint in your jazz guitar playing, drawing on what he's stolen — his word — from Bach, Bird and Bill Evans. Counterpoint sounds…

In this 2006 masterclass, Sid Jacobs demonstrates the real depth of guide tones — the 3rds and 7ths — for building strong solo guitar arrangements, counterpoint, comping, and melodically strong…

Sid Jacobs explores symmetrical scales for jazz guitar — how they're built, why they don't resolve like diatonic scales, and how to fold their modern, inside/outside sound into your lines and chord…

Sid Jacobs shows how the harmony of pianist Bill Evans translates to jazz guitar in this enhanced version of his 2006 masterclass. Sid traces the connection between Evans and guitarists like Lenny…