Mike Stern plays with technique and style unsurpassed in modern jazz and fusion. Click the image for more of his music.

Jazz/Funk pioneer Mike Stern talks about his favorite techniques playing over chord changes. The Half-Whole Diminished Scale is particularly useful for using dissonance over dominant 7th chords.

Stern’s own words about his style and his journey as a guitarist:

I’m a big proponent of transcribing other musicians’ solos, including those played on other instruments, such as the saxophone, trumpet or piano, for example. This has been a lifelong endeavor for me, one that I still enjoy and feel that I greatly benefit from every time I pursue it.

I started out as a blues-rock guitarist and spent a lot of time figuring out licks by such great players as Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, B.B. King and Buddy Guy, and I still love those guys. I eventually got some jazz records and tried to play along with them, but I got completely lost. It seemed that the vocabulary of jazz was so much more difficult—not necessarily better, just different. I favored the simplest stuff, and I still do, because it grabs my heart, and music is a language of the heart. But I was very intrigued by jazz and yearned to expand my knowledge of the guitar and music by studying that language.