Hit the wall and want to improve

[Proclaimer888]

Hit the wall and consider myself an average guitar player. Can anyone recommend some online lessons for breaking the wall down! I want to improvise and be able to truly understand the fretboard. I do not have a problem with paying for lessons if they meet my objectives.

[mr. beaumont]

Well, do you know all of the notes on the fretboard? How about your major scales? Gotta know what you know and don't to be of any help.

[Proclaimer888]

Originally Posted by mr. beaumont

Well, do you know all of the notes on the fretboard? How about your major scales? Gotta know what you know and don't to be of any help.

Know the notes however it sometimes takes some time to ident them. Much better with E, A and High E strings.

I can play the 5 pentatonic patterns but have trouble knowing how to use them when trying to improvise or play a lead with a song.

[mr. beaumont]

Ok, that gets us somewhere...

How about the genre of music you want to be able to do this in? Or open to all?

[hubcapsc]

Watch a few Guthrie Trapp videos and see what you think...

-Mike

[Charlie Bernstein]

Originally Posted by Proclaimer888

Know the notes however it sometimes takes some time to ident them. Much better with E, A and High E strings.

I can play the 5 pentatonic patterns but have trouble knowing how to use them when trying to improvise or play a lead with a song.

Aha! That helps. Great advice above. Here another list of ideas:

1. Take heart! I've been soloing on guitar for over fifty years and still can't name all the notes on the fretboard without thinking about it. And I don't know theory, either. But I can solo in all eleven major, minor, and mixolydian keys. Since I don't play jazz or classical or do studio work, there's never been a need to memorize notes or learn theory.* And I'm lazy.

2. When you say five pentatonic patterns, do you mean minor pentatonics in the CAGED keys? If you do, work on these three things:

- The major scales for the CAGED keys:

Essential. Major scales are the basis for all Western music. Without them, it's impossible to solo over most popular music.

- The major pentatonic scales for the CAGED keys:

Just slide the minor pentatonic scale down three frets. These are simply the major scales minus two notes.

- The harmonic minor scales for A-minor and E-minor (the most common minor keys for guitar):

These are the same as the major scales for C and G, their relative major keys. (If you don't know what relative majors and minors are, look that up. It's another simple fundamental.)

3. How comfortable are you with the four core bar shapes — E, A, G, and C (a.k.a. first, second, third, and fourth position)? If you know all of them up to the twelfth fret, it'll give you launch pads for soloing over all the above scales anywhere on the neck. All chord variations (minors, sevenths, and so on) grow out of them.

4. Do you ever put on your favorite music and just noodle along? Highly educational. And fun. You don't have to learn or copy every note or chord to learn things. Just getting the feel for a song will strengthen your ears. Which is what it's all about.

That's enough to keep you going for a long time. Keep us posted on how it's going!

------------------

If jazz is your goal, theory is inevitable. Get a book of jazz standards and a book on theory. Any will do. It's all based on scales, so knowing them cold is — again — essential.

[mr. beaumont]

Re: Sliding the minor pentatonic down and having the major pentatonic--yes, but with the caveat that the same licks don't necessarily work.

For example, the Chuck Berry bend the third string at one fret and play the top 2 strings two frets lower together...That doesn't magically become a good major pentatonic lick just by playing the whole thing 3 frets lower...

The major scale is the entire foundation of Western Harmony, and it's absolutely crucial to know it inside out.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Proclaimer888

Hit the wall and consider myself an average guitar player. Can anyone recommend some online lessons for breaking the wall down!

First - don't try! At least, don't try banging your head against it.

The usual solution when you hit a wall is to stay a step or two back. Then you usually either find a way round it, or you discover there is a ladder to get over it.

Seriously, what it means is that you have gone as far as you can in that direction (whatever the direction is). Sometimes - to mix the metaphors now - it's not so much that you hit a wall, but that you just run out of road. You chose a route that's ended in a dead end. OK, been down there, done that. Now what?

But the solution is the same. Don't just push ahead. Go back and reassess.

Originally Posted by Proclaimer888

I want to improvise and be able to truly understand the fretboard.

OK, there's two things there.

To answer the last one first (and taking your follow-up reply into account), you say you know the "5 pentatonic patterns", but do you know the 5 chord shapes in the CAGED system? How easily can you play the chords in any chord sequence you want to improvise on? How many places on the neck can you play - say - an A7 chord? (The 4 notes you need are available everywhere.)

Knowing the CAGED system means you can play all 12 major chords in 5 overlapping shapes all the way up the neck - and consequently you can pick any neck position (a 4-5 fret box) and play all 12 major chords in that space. And if you know which is the root-3rd-5th in each one, you can then lower the 3rd and play all 12 minor chords there too. Admittedly some of these will be partial shapes or arpeggios, but they are all there, as are all the 7th versions and so on.

Knowing chord shapes in more important than knowing scale patterns, because when you improvise on a song you start from the chords - and the chords spell out the whole scale between them. So you don't need to "apply" anything. You just play the chords, and the notes you need are all under your fingers already. You never get lost, and you always know what notes to improvise with. You don't even have to care what the name of the scale you are playing is.

Of course, that means you need to know the chords in any neck position you want to solo in. But you have to know the chords there anyway. If you only know the scale pattern (especially if you don't know the notes) you will just be noodling, relying on your ear, and probably playing the odd wrong note.

Knowing the chord shapes (and/or arpeggios) means you have your whole fretboard route map planned out, for any song whose chords you know. (There are no walls or dead ends on the fretboard! At least, not if you have a chord map...)

To answer the first question: being able to improvise means not only having a reasonable knowledge of the fretboard, it means knowing plenty of melodies, licks and riffs. I.e., if you only know one part of the fretboard really well, that's fine: any 4-5 fret position contains just over two octaves of notes, and that's 2/3 of the entire range of the guitar (and all the chords in every key are there too, as I said). But you can't solo sensibly or musically if you don't have some vocabulary. Good technique will help you noodle efficiently, but that's all it will be: random noodling.

Melody is essentially anything you can sing. You might not actually be able to sing yourself, but you have to imagine singing. You need an idea of the shape of melodic phrases, how to use breathing space, how different intervals work, how each note relates to the chord at that moment. All that stuff is learned by playing melodies.

The problem there for guitarists that don't read notation is that you very rarely find vocal melodies tabbed out. You can find countless guitar solos tabbed out, but that's a secondary resource (and sometimes the tab doesn't even give the accompanying chords, which makes it insanely useless). I.e, the player that produced that solo - if it's a good, classic one - had already absorbed a lot of melodic vocabulary, either from singing themselves, or by playing along with vocals. They certainly understood how to play to the chords, how to work from chord tones. They knew their chord shapes all over the neck!

In short, two things I recommend:

1. Check out the CAGED system - if you haven't already - and map out the fretboard in chord shapes. To start with, just choose any 3 or 4 simple chords you already know, and see how many plaves on the fretboard you can find the notes you need for each one. C, F and G chords, for example, will map out the C major scale all over the fretboard. That's 7/12 of the whole thing and the rest is just the sharps and flats in between.
(If you're already familiar with CAGED, build on it by working out more chord variants: 7ths, 6ths, sus chords, and so on. Pick any song, any position on the neck, and plot out all the chords in that position, moving your fret hand no more than a fret either way.)

2. Learn more songs. If you don't read notation - and really don't want to learn (a lot of great players don't read) - play along with recordings and try and copy the vocal, or play answering phrases to it. The individual notes are not as important as the rhythms and the idea of phrasing. The more songs you know (and the more completely you know each one) the bigger your general vocabulary for soloing ideas on any song.

[Proclaimer888]

Wow....some amazing feedback and suggestions! I REALY appreciate them. I now understand how vague my original post was and apologize for it. So, I can play many chords/bar chords. I can play many songs.....as long as I have the chords/tabs but I just cant seem to be getting better. Something is missing and it might just be that I will never get any better. I will admit that I have to work at my guitar playing.....I am not "gifted" if that makes any sense. I will take all the suggestions posted to heart and see what comes of it.

[Joe Beamish]

The first step might be defining what a better guitar player is for you. The answer to this could take you in a lot of different directions.

It could be really helpful to pick somebody you like and transcribe/cop the stuff for awhile.

[rick-slo]

Originally Posted by Proclaimer888

Hit the wall and consider myself an average guitar player. Can anyone recommend some online lessons for breaking the wall down! I want to improvise and be able to truly understand the fretboard. I do not have a problem with paying for lessons if they meet my objectives.

Learn to play some existing pieces in the style(s) you are interested in. That could be ones in a book or things you hear on the internet and you can
find the tab (and score if available). You will start to get the idea of how they are put together and get familiar using various chords and rhythms and
get some motor memory built in. Learn by listening and physically doing.

[zuzu]

I am no teacher and can merely relate what was helpful to my progress. Number 1 was learning the names of the chords and WHY they are called by those names. That alone is a big help to understanding how music fits together and so, how it relates to the notes found on the fretboard. Number 2 was learning triads, the 3 notes that define many chords, all over the fretboard, and using them instead of whole chords in songs. Number 3 was learning "standards", the popular songs of the past 100 years or so. They often contain chords that are only defined by 4 notes, adding ever more depth to your fretboard knowledge.

You will note that most of the above involves playing songs, actually using the new knowledge as you go, not "collecting" the knowledge then applying it. I can practice the physical aspect of playing fairly well, finger picking patterns, etc., but have always gone kinda blank when "studying" chord shapes and their relation to one another, and to the modes and scales, etc.. But I do begin to recognize those things from the actual playing of songs that use them, and retain them better that way than as information acquired through examination and memory.

But that's just me, and every one of us is different.

[Deliberate1]

First, my thanks to the OP for posting this. He and I are staring at the very same wall.

Many of the suggestions, especially with respect to fretboard knowledge, should be my next step as well. But, now that I am doing monthly open mics, I seem to spend my time working up original material for the 10 minute safe landing.

Coincidentally, I get some fretboard insight from the songwriting process - especially when I am looking for triad replacements to garnish songs. That is the only suggestion I can offer to the OP, but I think an important one. When you see how triads share notes among the strings, it shows how all the strings are related. And helps with note identification.

There is an overwhelming amount of information on the CAGED system. Any specific vids or resources for me and the OP?

And Charlie, I may just have to make the two hour trip down to Augusta, to steal your brain. I will call ahead....

David

[mr. beaumont]

CAGED is actually incredibly simple..
People make it out to be this magic thing, but really it's just taking what the guitar gives you.

The starting point would be to take a chord, let's say C major, and find it in each of the 5 positions.

Then, look at where the C major scale "lives" in that position.

Then repeat with every other chord, and then you'll be ready for minors

[Cecil6243]

Originally Posted by rick-slo

Learn to play some existing pieces in the style(s) you are interested in. That could be ones in a book or things you hear on the internet and you can
find the tab (and score if available). You will start to get the idea of how they are put together and get familiar using various chords and rhythms and
get some motor memory built in. Learn by listening and physically doing.

What Rick-slo says. Learn some new songs. For me I need to mix the scales and music theory with new songs or I go stale.