As you may have already gathered, any chord, arpeggio or scale can be written out as a sequence of intervals. This information is often lost on guitarists in favor of using a movable pattern, but the problem here is that … Read more
improv
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 … Read more
How to Easily Learn Multiple Scale Patterns
This might not be everyone’s cup of tea but if at some point you want to get into jazz or jazz fusion, and are into the scalar approach, you’ll need a way to learn multiple scale patterns without tearing your … 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
10 Ways to Better Improvising
Sometimes all it takes is a suggestion or a new perspective to jump-start your improvisation skills or give your solos a new lease of life, especially if you’re stuck in a rut. As guitarists we tend to fixate on scales,
… Read more
Two-Note-Per-String Major Scales and Modes
Here’s an interesting concept for you to try out. I remember playing around with it unintentionally when I first began to look at major scale patterns and their modes across the whole neck to see how they laid out. I … 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 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