Problems For a Amatuer Guitar Soloist. Anyone help?

It's not anything magical. You need to know your fingerboard, and be able to know where the next note you want to play is. That's your basic vocabulary.

A lot of the rest is phrasing. It's like speech:

YOU want to go?
You WANT to go?
You WANT to go!
You want to GO!

Same words, different inflection, different sense to the listener.

Taking a line that's boring, look at how you can go from one note to another in a different way - bend into it, slide into it, hammer/pull into it... each one gives you a different inflection, even though it's the same notes. Also, play with your timing - hold one note a little longer, make another shorter.

I'm remembering Harpo Marx playing 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame" or Victor Borge doing "Happy Birthday" - phrasing makes such a difference in interpretation.

Another thing to think about is target tones - where you want your melody to be when the backing chord changes... but I'm running late for rehearsal, so I'll talk about that later :)

Don't get discouraged! Time and again folks always experience an endless fascination of their own development. True learning results from intention, and demands faith, hope, trust, endurance, commitment and most of all fulfillment of itself with the failure of outside distractions and their success as meaningful experiences. Try to reach the highest level of your own potential.

The goal is that you don't want to be thinking about anything while you are actually making music. You just want to be in the feel of the music. One, and perhaps most important of all, is never give-up and never let go of your dreams. Just keep believing in yourself, in your humanity, in your abilities to communicate with your guitar, and something good, something positive will eventually come.

Try to envision how you want things to say. The process of learning in all areas of life is simply endless. There is always somewhere to go from wherever you find yourself at a given moment. It is easy to discover what you don't know, and to proceed accordingly. There's always something left to do, to be explored.

Play as much as you can. When you play you will realize what you need to bring into balance. Music is a spiritual path. You deal with stepping aside and letting creativity or an inexplicable force flow through you. It's a glorious to be able to play and express yourself. It can be learned with care, patience, and understanding.

Joe

Joe's given excellent advice. On the highest level, music is a zen experience - the mind is truly empty, and the music flows from a higher source... you're just the conduit.

On the other hand, as a guitar teacher, I have to take a practical approach to coaching improvisation. About half of my students started as rank beginners with me, so I try to develop the technical ability and the ear along with learning to improvise.

Earlier I mentioned target tones... the idea behind that is that you pick a tone that's part of an upcoming chord, and you build your line so you land on that note just as the chord changes. Root tones are an obvious choice, but they tend to have too much resolution in the middle of a solo... I'll often shoot for the fifth. If the upcoming chord is F, try to land on a C note. Doing that will force your solo lines to coincide with the accompaniment, and they'll help you with chord spelling and ear development.

Like any improvisation 'trick', it's just a step on the road - ultimately, you want to reach the point where you just play and don't worry about it.

I'm hardly an expert on the subject, and this is not exactly sage advice, but I'll tell you what helps with me.

I find that since I started playing guitar about a year ago, I listen much, much more analytically. I don't just listen for enjoyment, I try to think about what they're doing. Take a solo that you like and really listen to it. There will probably be at least one or two spots in that solo that really stick out to you for one reason or another. It could be one note or one line, whatever. Analyze those spots. Figure out what they played, and more importantly why they played it. What chord was it played over, what kind of mood was it setting, etc? You don't have to figure out the whole solo note for note, as that could be a daunting task. Rather, just pick out the highlights, figure out how, where, and when to play them. Little by little these things creep into your own vocabulary when playing when you least expect it.

I also find that the call and response aspect of guitar is a great tool in helping your soloing. Sing a line. Then respond to it with a line on the guitar. It really helps in developing that vocal quality on the guitar. It's not an extended jam, but it can sound really cool.

Also if you can find some decent jam tracks, that can help too, and simply playing along with recordings.

Hi.
A cool improvisonal trick to do is using a penatonic scale
is make sure to hit the same note as the bassist - the first note
of every measure will do OK for Blues bluesy rock stuff...
that's Basic though. but if you start slow and do that, you only got
seven quarter notes to fool with.
Do that with your bass player on the side... you'll get two things
out of that. you'll develop and ear for your bassist and have tighter rythyms
and then you'll get REALLY bored with quarter notes and figure out on you own what to replace them with (thus developing your own unique style)

Also, when you solo..you know your scales? the different positions too?
try to play using the whole neck. alot of notes sound better coming from the B string than the E.

The flash like pull-offs and hammers and what not...well you're going to have to figure that out on your own.
But remember doing that more while soloning than what Eddie Van Halen
would do on the same song becomes overkill and not enough, people
listening might think they're at the doctor's office or in an elevator
or something.
oh yeah there's a book out there, an old evil Mel Bay book of finger exercises...man the exercises suck, they sound horrible and
the lesson plan is overly demanding IMO, but if you get this book and make at least a 60% effort in keeping up with the routines, in a year
you'll see a serious improvement in playing. I'm sorry, I don't know the name
of the book offhand, I got it around here...somewhere but it's first printing
is like 1958, the book i have has a green cover on it and I think
a black & white photo.
If I find this book (we got two violinists in the house too) i'll start a new thread just name the title.
This book is that good for lead playing development.
Stretching exercises... stretch your fingers...all the time- well often :wink:

Oh well i hope all that helps you some how.

Hiya,

Was it Greybeard who said that he started just running up and down a pentatonic, and then started changing direction and skipping notes as the mood took him?

Give it a try. I think there's a lot of great advice in that one line - just wish I could remember who said it.

Best,

A :-)

langren

You mentioned several things in your post that are significant. You said you have lost confidence. Well, that is one of the big secrets of improvising well. You must learn to relax and just trust yourself. You cannot worry yourself into playing a good solo. No, just the opposite. You just have to throw yourself into it with abandon. When I improvise, I have no idea whatsoever what I'm going to do. REALLY. I just go. That is what improvisation is. It is not memorized. It is not planned out ahead. It is just whatever occurs to you at the moment. You have to listen to the song and play what you hear in your head at the time. Do not worry if it is great. Do not worry if you repeat a lick. Do not worry at all. Just go with the flow.

Sometimes you hear a lick in your head but are not sure how to play it. Go ahead and guess. Just try to play it. Sometimes you'll nail it. Sometimes you won't. But even if you don't, you might hear something in there really cool, and that will give you a new idea on the spot.

It is good to practice technique. This will enable you to play the sounds in your head (or at least come close). So practice technique all the time.

It may have been the movie Dirty Harry, but Clint Eastwood once said, "A man's got to know his limitations". That is good advice. You must know your strengths and weaknesses on guitar. It might occur to you to play some lightning fast sweep picking arpeggios up the neck during a solo, like you heard Steve Vai do on a recording. That's great and maybe the coolest thing you could play at that time, but can you do it??? If not, then don't try it. You will probably blow it big time and play something that sounds pure junk. Then your confidence will be shot. No, practice this kind of thing at home until you are capable of pulling it off in an improvised solo.

So you are not mindless when you play. You have to play within your abilities. It is good to push it a little bit though. You will be surprised what you can pull off at times.

You said you are in a band. Listen to each song and ask yourself how that song makes you feel. And then try to play a solo that fits and brings out this feeling. Is is sad? Maybe you want to play long, soulful sounds from a minor scale (like someone moaning or crying). Is it happy? Then maybe you want to play something fast and bouncy from the major scale (like someone laughing). Is it insane? Then maybe you want to play random, disassociated notes all over the fretboard. Is it angry? Then you play something pointed, in your face (like you're so mad you're yelling and spitting in someone's face). Make sounds that imitate reality.

What if I hit a bad sounding note? Listen, there ain't no such thing. When I hit a note like this I instantly think, "What can I do with this?". You will be surprised. Sometimes a bad note will lead to the coolest, most original lick you've ever played. Make it work for you. Milk that baby. See what you can get out of it.

So play to the mood of the song. Play within your abilities, but push it a little. If you hit a bad note make something cool out of it. But don't think too much, AND NEVER WORRY.

Hi. I think Mr. Inman summed it up pretty good...
But i got to thinking.. Is improvisation REALLY random and un thought?
I don't think so... I think it's more like instinctive and subconscous.
Not like breathing but like walking into a dark room and turning on the light switch - you know like that.
I mean we have the theory constantly running in the back ground when we're playing, our brain knows this and when it comes to "solo time",
the brain plays the notes it knows (or think it knows) will fit in
with the rythm. And by what mood you're in, the brain will attempt
to find the right note or lick or whatever that will show that mood, while still being in sync with the song at hand.

Now what if someone had multiple personality disorder?

Uh, back to the topic... one thing I used to do was get the songs that I only knew the first part of and strung them together here and there.
with little licks or scale progressions in between.
For some reason, that impressed people. It wasn't a routine, more like
the mindless jamming you do when buying a guitar.
Doing a solo during a song, well if it's a cover song, it doesn't really have to be note for note. One of my bad habits was to try and do that. It sounded really clunky and manufactured at times.

LOL, i don't think Robin Trower EVER played the same solo twice on any of his songs.

and yeah just relax ...if you don't have any unexplained lapses in
memory and awakened in strange places, you should do ok :)

I think Wes has it right. You learn the theory and scales and arpeggios and all that so you have the sounds and fingerings at your disposal. You don't think about it as you play, at least not obviously.

If you're improvising over changes you haven't heard before, like a jazz chart, you see a Fm7 and maybe you'll use notes from the F Dorian mode. You don't think "I'm gonna play in Dorian" - you think "oh, a D minor sound" and one comes up from somewhere without thinking. Because you've practiced that scale, you have that sound stored away somewhere, but you don't think about it.

The only time I really think in theory terms when I solo is if I make a real clunker. I'll do a nice run, but end with a 'wrong' note. Maybe I played C at the end of the phrase, and I was a half step too low. I'll think to myself "C#" and then work at getting to a C# with a similar run (maybe I'll even repeat the 'wrong' run first, so the whole thing sounds intentional in form).

Like Thelonius Monk said, "If a note ain't right when I start with it - it's right when I'm done with it"

Hi langren

My advice is my usual:

ALWAYS know what the 'chord of the moment is' and use the notes that make up the chord as your main melody notes, those that fall on the strong beats.

Once you can picture chords for they really are -- a selection of notes that occupy the whole fretboard -- then you can picture the outlines of all strong melodies. How to fill in the gaps between will become fairly obvious once you lock these chord tones in.

It really is all in how you're thinking. If you're thinking 'scales' you're probably thinking in linear terms ... sequences of notes; if you're thinking 'chord tones', it's more of a matrix of notes ... you're coming in to a more detailed look of what's needed for that moment. The chord sort of crystallizes the scale to exactly what's required for that moment, which is how music manifests itself to us: moment by moment. We know that these moments all add up to a 'song', or a 'tune', but in actual fact, we experience music in time, moment by moment.

Try taking your lead lines moment by moment, chord by chord, and focus on seeing chords in multiple positions at once.

Kirk