Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar with Sean McGowan
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Course Structure Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar with Sean McGowan
Each lesson builds on the last, taking you from zero to hero!
Master fingerstyle jazz guitar with Sean McGowan. Over 150 lessons covering technique, chord voicings, comping, harmony, chord melody, and a variety of improvisation styles and approaches.
Technique: Fretting Hand Independence
Build fretting hand strength, speed, and independence with essential technique exercises. Boost control and coordination with warm-ups, finger drills, and slurred scale workouts. Master finger independence and articulation for cleaner, faster fretting and transitions.
Technique: Picking Hand Independence
Develop precise picking hand control with arpeggios, dynamics, and rhythmic workouts. Strengthen picking hand skills through accents, string crossing, and chord variations. Gain control, rhythm, and expression with dynamic picking and chord-focused exercises.
Technique: Hand Synchronization
Build hand sync, thumb control, and chord melody skills with advanced fingerstyle workouts. Master thumb technique, speed rolls, and counterpoint for rich fingerstyle expression. Sharpen coordination, thumb articulation, and 10ths-based chord melody techniques.
Technique: Extended Techniques
Explore harmonics, hybrid picking, and percussive touches to enrich your sound. Add expressive color with pedal points, harmonics, and right-hand fretting techniques. Learn advanced textures using harmonics, rhythmic effects, and hybrid picking.
Fingerstyle Jazz Essentials
Explore walking bass lines, guide tones, and blues etudes to deepen your jazz rhythm skills. Learn jazz rhythm and articulation through walking bass and expressive phrasing tools. Build fingerstyle fluency and feel for blues, standards, and classic jazz progressions.
Chord Voicings
Unlock rich chord voicings from guide tones to 9ths and apply them in real musical contexts. Explore 3–5 note voicings, triad pairs, and smooth voice leading across jazz progressions. Build your chord vocabulary and comp more confidently with expressive jazz voicings.
Harmony
Explore harmony with diatonic chords, cadences, and expanded jazz voicing options. Learn to create rich textures using cadences, substitutions, and borrowed chords. Build harmonic fluency through 7th chords, substitutions, and essential progressions.
Melody & Improv: Solo Guitar Improvisation
Learn to improvise and create melodies using chord shapes and Q&A phrasing. Build improv skills and melodic ideas with chord forms and structured solos. Unlock soloing and arranging with more phrasing concepts, chord inversions, and expressive etudes.
Melody & Improv: Single Note Lines
Improvise with confidence using CAGED, connected phrasing, and melodic tools across the fretboard. Master melodic improvisation with arpeggios, phrasing, and expressive soloing tools. Learn to solo with style using fretboard neighborhoods, rhythm, and phrasing tricks.
Melody & Improv: Modal Soloing Concepts
Unlock modal soloing with pentatonics, intervals, and creative phrasing to build expression. Learn to solo modally with scales, patterns, and tension-building techniques. Explore modal improvisation with pentatonic subs, intervals, and dynamic phrasing tools.
About Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar with Sean McGowan
Sean McGowan has created a definitive video library that includes hundreds of online guitar lessons. Students have unlimited access to Sean's entire guitar method, plus play-along tracks, and other study materials. What ultimately sets these guitar lessons apart from other online offerings is the ability to submit a video for review using the ArtistWorks Video Exchange learning platform. Sean reviews each submission and records a video response, offering tips about how to progress. All students can access the Video Exchange library, which is constantly expanding and may contain the key to unlock your playing.
About Sean McGowan
Sean McGowan is a fingerstyle jazz guitarist who combines many diverse musical influences with unconventional techniques to create a broad palette of textures within his compositions and arrangements for solo guitar. As a solo artist, he has released six critically acclaimed albums, including his record debut River Coffee, which won the Best Independent Release of the Year Award (2002) from Acoustic Guitar magazine, and Sphere: the Music of Thelonious Monk, which was named one of Acoustic Guitar magazine’s “Essential Albums of 2011.” Sean has performed at notable worldwide festivals including the Novi Sad International Jazz Festival in Serbia, the Healdsburg Guitar Festival in Napa Valley, Copper Mountain Guitar Town, the La Conner Guitar Festival, the Chet Atkins CAAS Convention, and the Artisan Guitar Show with Jimmy Bruno and Brent Mason. Sean is an avid arts educator and currently serves as an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Colorado Denver. He earned a DMA in Guitar Performance from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and has conducted workshops at colleges and guitar organizations throughout the country. Sean is a contributing editor and educational advisor for Acoustic Guitar magazine and is also the author of Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar Solos (Hal Leonard) and the String Letter book/video instructional methods: The Acoustic Jazz Guitarist, Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar Essentials, and Holiday Songs for Fingerstyle Guitar. Sean has taught at ArtistWorks since August 2024 and has also produced eight courses for ArtistWorks’ sister company, TrueFire.
What students are saying!
Sean is one of the best player/educators around!
Every lesson I've seen from Sean McGowan is very well organized and demonstrated expertly. Sean makes challenging material accessible for us mere mortals. Each course is outstandin...
5.0 (1)