“I recommend every guitar player to learn just the basics of bossa nova.”

This isn’t just casual advice—it’s a philosophy from Dominic Miller, the legendary guitarist and composer best known for his decades-long collaboration with Sting.

With an impressive discography that includes work with some of the world’s most famous artists, Dominic is well-versed in virtually every genre. But today, he’s teaching me about his first love: bossa nova.

And his reasoning is compelling: learning bossa nova is a double-edged sword in the best way possible. You’ll learn about feel, you’ll learn about jazz chords, and you’ll learn about touch. So once you’ve got the basics of bossa nova, there are many places you can go from there.

What Makes Bossa Nova Special?

Bossa nova emerged from Brazil in the late 1950s, blending samba rhythms with jazz harmony. The word “bossa” roughly translates to “style” or “flair,” and that perfectly captures what this music is about: sophisticated simplicity, laid-back elegance, and emotional restraint.

For guitarists, bossa nova offers something unique:

Rhythmic sophistication: Complex syncopation that trains your internal clock

Harmonic richness: Jazz chord progressions that expand your vocabulary

Dynamic control: Subtle touch and dynamics that develop finesse

Musical maturity: The art of laying back, creating space, and letting music breathe

Before diving into chords and progressions, you must understand one fundamental truth about bossa nova: everything is laid back.

Most guitarists naturally rush. We’re eager, excited, and want to push the music forward. But bossa nova requires the opposite—as Dominic advises: “You got to lay back. It’s just really super laid back.”

The count is “1-2-3-4,” but imagine each beat arriving just a fraction later than you expect. Not dragging, not sloppy—just relaxed, confident, and unhurried.

The Trance State

Before you play anything technical you want to establish this groove. Dominic actually recommends just sitting with the rhythm for five minutes – even making a phone call or reading a book while maintaining that rhythmic pulse.

This isn’t wasted time—it’s the foundation everything else builds on. Without internalizing the feel, the chords and melody won’t have the right character.

The Basic Chord: D7 / Am6

The foundational chord that we’re playing over in this progression is a D7, which Dominic thinks of as an Am6 as the bass note alternates between the note of D on the A string 5th fret and the note of A at the 5th fret of the E string.

These two voicings are as follows:

Using this chord shape and alternating the bass note of the chord, Dominic then applies three rhythmic patterns that form the backbone of bossa nova guitar playing:

Rhythm 1: Everything on the Beat

In our first bossa nova rhythm, all of the notes fall on the beats:

This is your starting point. Get comfortable with this before moving to the syncopated patterns.

Rhythm 2: The Syncopated Push

This is where bossa nova gets its characteristic lilt. The chord hits are “pushed”—they come slightly before the beat—while the bass stays steady.

This creates tension and release. The bass grounds everything while the chords dance around the pulse.

Rhythm 3: The Variation

The third pattern mixes elements of both, creating variety within the groove:

This pattern has a more staccato feel, with the muting adding a more abrupt quality to the rhythm.

Once you have these three rhythms, you can then move between them fluidly within a progression. This keeps the groove alive and prevents monotony for both player and audience.

The Chord Progression: A Bossa Nova Standard

If we apply these rhythms to a bossa nova chord progression, we end up with the following:

We can actually then enrich this progression by adding extensions to the chords and playing the same progression and rhythm, but with these voicings:

These chords create a richer and more sophisticated sound— they’re still playable, but they bring additional harmonic color into the piece.

Integrating Melody: The Complete Picture

The ultimate goal is combining the rhythm, chords, and melody simultaneously. This is where bossa nova becomes a complete solo guitar experience.

To add melody, we have to give something up, as there aren’t enough fingers to play the full bass line, complete chord voicings, AND melody notes.

The first solution here is to change the D9 chord to an Am6 chord:

In this way, we are no longer alternating the bass line of the chord, and instead focusing on picking out the melody.

When we do this, and play out of each chord, we end up with the following progression:

As you move through this progression, the melody continues on top while the bass notes and inner voices change, however in bar 6 the chords drop out and the melody rings out unaccopanied.

As Dominic observes:

“There’s nothing wrong with having a melody on its own. Sometimes it’s very beautiful—like the vocals when the band drops out.”

This creates breathing room and contrast. Solo guitar is “like a mini orchestra,” and it often helps to think like an arranger—when to have the full ensemble, when to feature soloists and when to create space.

Improvising Over Bossa Nova

One of the beautiful aspects of bossa nova is that you can use your blues or pentatonic vocabulary, and it will sound beautiful.

Over this particular progression we are thinking about our home base chord as being Am6. In this way you can solo using your familiar A minor pentatonic scale shapes but create a very different feel in your playing.

The key – as Dominic mentions – is to play it “really laid back, in jazz time.”

The notes might be the same pentatonic scale you’d use in blues or rock, but the phrasing, timing, and articulation change everything.

Final Thoughts

Bossa nova represents something increasingly rare in modern guitar playing: patience, subtlety, and restraint. In a world of flashy technique and aggressive playing, it offers a different path—one focused on feel, touch, and emotional nuance.

The basics are accessible to any intermediate guitarist. You don’t need blazing speed or complex technique. You need:

• A good sense of time
• Patience to lay back
• Willingness to play softly
• Appreciation for space and simplicity
• Dedication to developing feel over flash

Start simple. Learn the basic rhythm on one chord. Get that feeling into your body. Then add the chord changes. Then the melody. Take your time—rushing defeats the entire purpose of bossa nova.

As Dominic says, it’s all about the touch. And once you’ve got the basics of bossa nova, there are so many places you can go from there.