Advanced Modern Guitar

Advanced Modern Guitar gives you a deep, practical roadmap to modern harmony, rhythm, and improvisation on the fretboard. Guided by composer, producer, and guitarist Costas Baltazanis, you will refine the core skills that contemporary players rely on in real musical settings, from sophisticated voicings and modal language to time feel and motivic development.

Across immersive lessons, you will explore how to create color and tension with scales and chords, use melodic displacement to reshape lines, and connect arpeggios and intervals in ways that unlock new phrasing. You will also learn to apply these concepts over chord changes and full songs so your practice translates into expressive, musical outcomes.

What You’ll Learn

• Complex chord voicings, including drop two shapes and advanced tensions
• Modal approaches from major and melodic minor, plus scales over dominant chords
• Intervals, arpeggios, and superimposition for modern melodic lines
• Rhythmic precision, displacement, and phrasing across styles
• Reharmonization, motivic development, and playing over chord changes
• Real song application, including analysis of the jazz standard Black Orpheus

Meet Your Instructor

Costas Baltazanis is a seasoned composer, producer, guitarist, and educator with a global performance footprint and deep academic leadership experience. A Berklee College of Music graduate in jazz guitar performance and composition, he has contributed to more than 100 records, produced albums for diverse artists, performed internationally, and authored educational books. He has led programs at the Philippos Nakas Conservatory in Athens and served on Berklee’s Scholarship Committee, bringing a rare blend of artistry and pedagogy to every lesson.

Is This Course for You?

This course is ideal if you already have a solid command of basic chords, scales, and time feel and you want to push into modern vocabulary that works in jazz, fusion, pop, and world-influenced contexts. If you are ready to expand your harmonic palette, make your solos more lyrical and intentional, and comp with greater nuance, you will feel right at home here.

What’s Included

• Step-by-step lessons on intervals, arpeggios, and superimposition
• Modal frameworks from major and melodic minor, plus dominant chord strategies
• Practical drills for rhythmic displacement and time feel
• Reharmonization and motivic development workflows you can reuse
• Song applications and guided analysis for real-world context

Ready to expand your voice on the instrument and connect modern theory to expressive playing? Start learning today.