Learn to improvise

Lola

❤️guitar
Joined
Jan 24, 2022
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This has been difficult for me to get out of playing the standard box shapes. More less I am trying to think outside the box.

This particular song is so amazing to jam to and you need to explore all the possibilities. Dig deep! I am playing stuff and I am sort of impressed with how semi mediocre I sound. I know the only way is up.

Take a listen

 
I was once mainly a jazz saxophonist. It was helpful for me to think of improvisation as "spontaneous composition." So it helped to give myself a little more time with the composing part. I'd take a song I was learning to improvise over and write out a few solos. A main focus was taking a motif and developing it over the changes. Repeat it, embellish it, build upon it, reach a climax. Two big inspirations were Sonny Rollins' "Blue Seven" and Joe Henderson's solo in Horace Silver's "Song for My Father." They're jazz saxophone solos, but a lot of fantastic rock solos do that, too, like Gilmour and Knopfler's.

Then I'd use what I learned when improvising, including some of the licks and idea I came up with.
 
Learning how to make melodic music with scales is probably the biggest sticking point in every guitar players journey. I had some pretty tough issues with it. I knew my scales pretty well but had issues making music with them. It honestly took me setting down and just beating on it for a good long time before things started coming together. I had gone to two different teachers trying to get this worked out. What I found is that guys that taught and could also improvise and play well had no real idea how to teach others how to do this. I spent so much time figuring it out that I decided to start teaching and get others past the sticking point that hung me up for so long. It became my mission to get others past this point. I also started teaching from a different perspective than I had been taught.

I had a 14 year old kid that I took on. I was his first teacher. His dad kept telling me that he was playing all the time. He was really excited about the stuff I was teaching him. He said he was also really impressed with the things he was hearing come out of his kid while playing. I think our teaching methods are part of the problem with figuring these things out.
 
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