Autumn Leaves is the tune every jazz student meets on day one, the reluctant "Wonderwall" of the jazz jam session. Play the first four bars in any music school hallway and watch three saxophonists appear out of thin air, ready to take a chorus you never offered them.
This 67-second clip is my comping approach to those famous changes, but with a twist that keeps things civilised: every chord is rooted with its bass note on the D string. No fretboard gymnastics, no reaching for chords that require a sixth finger you don't have, just tidy voicings that sit in the middle of the neck and behave themselves.
How D-string comping on Autumn Leaves works
Autumn Leaves is a textbook ii–V–I machine: it cycles through the cadence in G major and then in its relative E minor, which is exactly why teachers love it. When you root your voicings on the D string, the bass note lands in the middle register, you leave the low E and A strings out of it, and you stop stepping on the bass player's toes. What is left in your grip is the important stuff, the 3rd and the 7th, the two guide tones that actually tell the ear whether a chord is major, minor or dominant.
The practical takeaway: find each chord's root on the D string, then stack the 3rd and 7th just above it and voice-lead them smoothly from one chord to the next. Those two notes usually move by a single fret or stay put, so a whole chorus of simple jazz chords becomes a gentle, almost lazy hand movement. Add a steady four-to-the-bar pulse and you have a rhythm study that sounds like a working jazz guitarist rather than someone counting under their breath.
Grab the PDF and Guitar Pro file, put on a fake moustache, and tell everyone you've been playing jazz for years. Full tabs and the original video are on my Patreon.