Category: Melodic Soloing
By far the quickest way to get stuck in a rut with your guitar playing is the memorization trap. What do I mean by this? If you peruse any of the well-know guitar forums, you’ll no doubt have seen people asking questions like, ‘I’ve memorized all 5 patterns of the pentatonic scale, what do I […]
You might be feeling somewhat overwhelmed at this point, so it would be a good idea to take a breather and take stock of what we’ve learned so far about soloing over chord changes. 3 Things to Realize The first thing to realize is that you don’t have to play ALL the chord tones over […]
It’s no secret that your average saxophone player is light-years ahead of your average guitarist when it comes to improvisation; this is mainly because your average saxophonist knows the shit out of chords, but your average guitarist doesn’t. This is slightly ironic because you can’t play chords on a saxophone, but anyway, what I’d like […]
This lesson follows on from the approach we looked at in Blues Soloing Tricks: How to Blend Major and Minor Sounds, so be sure to check that one out if you haven’t already as it contains the building blocks for where we’re headed next. The 4 is an interesting interval in a blues, yet a […]
The blues note is of course the b5, and if you’ve been following this series of blog posts, you’ll find it just after the 4, which we looked at in Blues Soloing Tricks: What to Do with the 4. I remember discovering the b5 through learning the blues scale (1, b3, 4, b5, 5, b7), […]
Transitioning from blowing up and down pentatonic scales to purposely crafting your solos by taking the chord changes into account can be frustrating for guitarists. It’s also a blow to the ego as you basically have to suck it up, slow down, and really pay attention to the notes you’re playing. The blues is a […]
I can’t remember where I saw this but it’s a great exercise for improving your phrasing, as well as getting out of scale ruts and so forth. It’s similar to the idea we looked at in the How to Create Melodic Guitar Solos post, and turns the idea of choosing what notes YOU want to […]
I’ve never really been into learning other people’s guitar solos note-for-note, so you won’t find a whole lot of those type of articles on this blog. What I do like to do occasionally is take a closer look at how a player would approach a solo, or at what’s going on in their head, and […]
If you were to learn how to improvise without using scales, how would you go about it? This the was the question I set out to answer over the last year or so, and the fruit of that research is our newest addition to the eBook family: Soloing without Scales. There’s a book by Carl […]
Traditional methods of learning scales such as the CAGED System and the 3NPS System don’t really lead to melodic guitar solos. This is mainly due to the rote, drill-type way in which they’re learned—endlessly, and often mindlessly running up and down scale patterns then fighting with your fingers to do the exact opposite: play something […]
