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: soloing
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 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 Find Scale Patterns That Work For You
Nowadays, I play in fourths tuning (EADGCF) around 75% of the time because I love it, and the rest of the time I use standard (covers gigs, teaching, etc.) because it’s just more practical. However, one of the things I…
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…
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…
How to Solo Over Chord Changes (Part 3)
In Part 3, we start soloing over chord changes using the four base sequences from Part 2. Remember, this is a much more efficient process if you have a looper pedal at hand. If you don’t have one yet, you…