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…
Tag: improv
When NOT Breaking Out of the Box is a Good Thing
You’ve probably seen a ton of stuff on the internet, and particularly on YouTube, about ‘breaking out of the box’, which basically means you’re stuck in a scale pattern and want to somehow break free of it to play more…
An Alternative to the 5 Pentatonic Shapes
The 5 pentatonic shapes are a staple of learning rock or blues guitar, though truth be told most guitarists generally use 3 of them at the most. In our latest book, ‘Woodshedder’s Guide to Guitar Scales‘, we reduced the number…
Hack #13: Blues Scales: Start with Mixolydian
This is an excerpt from 25 Guitar Scale Hacks, check out the full eBook here. If you’re getting into blues soloing, you’re probably already familiar with the minor/major pentatonic and blues scales. While these scales are of course the bread…
Practicing Without Patterns
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…