Playing Gypsy Jazz on Solo Fingerstyle Guitar - Djangology

Gypsy jazz guitar is one of the most exciting styles to play for Guitarist at any level. That characteristic "la pompe" rhythm coupled with beautiful melodic phrases often incorporating "gypsy" elements like the harmonic minor scale, Hungarian (or gypsy) minor scale, and copious ornaments (like quick hammer on it and pull offs) make for a musical style that is instantly recognizable and distinctive.

While you could go down a never ending rabbit hole trying to replicate this style as it was originally played on steel string guitar (which I encourage you to do!), we as Fingerstyle/nylon string guitarists have the whole musical world is our oyster because our stock-in-trade is combining chords and melodies together into solo guitar arrangements. 

But how to do this with gypsy jazz? Because that driving "la pumpe" rhythm is so much a part of gypsy jazz, we will have to make concessions and compromises to get there, but we can do it! Let's look at one of Django Reinhardt's own original songs, Djanglogy. This is a tried and true gypsy jazz favorite and one that is on every gypsy jazz guitarist's setlist. 

First let's look at the chords of the first 8 of this song: 

We begin with an inversion of an A major chord (A/C#), move down to a C diminished seventh, then the exact same thing repeats 2 frets down where we play an inversion of G major (G/B) and getting ourselves into a B-flat diminished seventh chord. So for our solo arrangement, we are going to have to follow this specific base movement because it is a characteristic part of Djangology - it's not just that we are going from an A to a C diminished seventh chord, etc. but that we are moving down in the bass chromatically from C-sharp to be flat (after this we continue our chromatic move down to an A note on the 6th string). So to capture what's happening here in the accompaniment we need to follow this exact bass movement (inversions give us a different sound!).

Now let's look at the first 8 bars of the melody of Djangology: 

If you notice, most of the notes in melody are notes in the chord – this is no accident, the best sounding melodies are playing "to the chord" and this is especially the case in older music like gypsy jazz. Also notice that the first note in each melodic phrase is the same as the low note in each of our first four chords – this is fantastic news! This means that we can combine the chords and melody together by playing the first note of the melody an octave lower (which puts us in exactly the range we would be playing if we played the rhythm). Let's combine these altogether in the 7th position and we get this chord shape:  

Now all we have to do is arpeggiate these notes from lowest to highest (using fingers p-i-m-a) and we get not only the melody but also the flavor of the chords being played underneath:

Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? The end of this first phrase is a "block chord" where we can pluck all of our fingers at the same time - however we can get a little bit of a replication of the "la pompe" rhythm by striking the strings downward as well.

Let's do this same thing for the next three chords:

So once we have these four chord shapes which have the melody incorporated in them, we simply do the same "forward arpeggio" for each chord:  

(*Notice at the end we have a G note in the melody all by itself, so I have written my arrangement to include an octave of that note.) 

So this is how I have approached composing a solo guitar chord melody arrangement of Django's classic Djangology. You can do this with any song that you have a lead sheet for - a lead sheet gives us the basic melody and the basic chords and from there the sky is the limit as to what we can do with a solo guitar arrangement! Go here to get lead sheets for my Top Five Gypsy Jazz Songs of all time and see if you can make your own solo arrangement of one of these songs using only the lead sheet and your knowledge of the guitar neck.

In the meantime, let me walk you through the rest of my Djangology solo arrangement in this lesson video: