I’ll advise what i find is the most important agenda, and then write down what amongst your options can help achieve the agenda.
1) Musical sense and ear
This is by far the most important. It’s the brain and central nervous system. Being able to play 1000 notes a second would be useless if they made no musical sense.
- Copying songs and solos by ear is a good way to develop this.
- It also develops ‘feel’ because you’re learning from the best writers and players by aping them.
- Copy the solos by ear and then examine where they lie on the blues minor and major scales. This will give you an appreciation and identity of each note on the scale, in relation to the bass note or key of the song, so that you don’t play the scales blindly.
2) Improvisation
- Scales are indispensable for this ability. You have to extrapolate and then familiarise the minor and major scales throughout the whole fingerboard.
- Then you have to learn to identify each note by ear (blindfolded), in relation to the bass or key of the song. That way, you’re never lost and you always know exactly where you are at any time. That’s also true musicianship because you already know how each note will sound before you play them, so you can literally play exactly what is in your head, live real time. That makes your live improvised solos melodic and musical, as opposed to just running up and down the scales robotically. That’s important.
3) Right and left hand coordination.
- This is really important to get right. It’s far better to play slow, and use the slow speed to gain a feel of what it means to really coordinate your picking and fingering, than to attempt to play fast before you achieve that feel and coordination.
- No option for this other than practice, and paying meditative attention to the picking and fingering as they occur. As you get better go faster.
4) Techniques
- Once you master the basics above, techniques like proper bending, vibrato, vibrato while bending, harmonics, pinch harmonics, tap harmonics etc are very valuable for enhancing the quality of your playing.
- Best way for techniques is a (good) teacher or YouTube. Books are not so useful. Neither are teachers that do not have the ability to gauge where you are, your personal objectives, and then chart a systematic path customized to you. There are teachers with whom lessons are laissez faire chit chat sessions.
That’s about all I can conjure. I am not a good player mind you, just an okay one, so take my advice with a pinch of salt. I just play well enough to record my own songs and that’s my objective all along.
