A student once asked me if there was a foolproof way not to get lost when soloing on guitar and as I didn’t really have a magic bullet answer, I thought I’d get into it in this article. There are…
Category: Soloing Over Chord Changes
The Memorization Trap
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 result….
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…
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…
How to Solo Over Chord Changes (Part 6)
In Part 6, we look at the mysterious world of 11 and #11 chords and how to simplify the process of soloing over them. If you missed any of the previous parts, here are the the links: Part 1 Part…
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…