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 … Read more
Soloing Over Chord Changes
Pentatonics Pro – All 330 Pentatonic Scale Combinations
Pentatonics Pro is a side project I’ve been working on for a while now which involved mapping out the 330 possible pentatonic scales into a collection of scale patterns (combinations of 5 intervals) along with a method to explore them … Read more
Blues Soloing Tricks: How to Easily Jazz Up Your Blues Soloing
It’s been a while since we’ve looked at blues soloing, so I thought I’d add to the Blues Soloing Tricks series of posts with a quick lesson on using the upper chord extensions to get a jazzier sound in standard … Read more
How Not to Get Lost When Improvising Over Little Wing
A common problem among guitarists is getting lost while improvising. There are many reasons for this, the most notorious one being an over-reliance on patterns. Patterns are a double-edged sword on guitar as they lend themselves well to getting you … Read more
The 2 Golden Rules for Combining Scales with Chords
We’ve been talking a lot on the blog lately about improvisation methods and systems. The guitar is a double-edged sword in this regard as a solo can be approached in many ways depending on the player and the desired … Read more
How to Solo Over Chord Changes (Part 8)
In Part 8, we look at the last of the upper chord extensions: the 13, and we’ll also be walking you through the process of analyzing a set of changes in order to approach soloing over them using everything we’ve … Read more
How to Solo Over Chord Changes (Part 7)
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 … Read more
The first … Read more
How to Solo Over Chord Changes (Part 6)
How to Solo Over Chord Changes (Part 5)
So far, we’ve looked at our core intervals, the 1, 3, and 7 (plus the b3 and b7), the 5 and the natural 6. Let’s turn our attention to the 9; the 9 is the same as the 2 but … Read more
How to Solo Over Chord Changes (Part 4)
In Part 4 of this series of blog posts, we look at how to decode chords and compare improvising with scales to thinking in intervals. The latter approach allows us to have more control over what we play while understanding … Read more