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Old 12-30-2019, 11:36 AM
Sponserv Sponserv is offline
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Default Improvising frustration

Is there a point when trying to figure out improvising and phrasing where a light bulb just goes off?

I understand pentatonic boxes and adding in the blues notes, etc. But for the life of me I cannot figure out how to put a lick together that sounds good. I am NOT going to run to tab to figure it out. I am determined to figure it out myself but wow....it does not come easy to me.

Thoughts?
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Old 12-30-2019, 12:27 PM
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Too many shredders are fast but what they play boring. Good you are looking for interesting improvisation. Find some solo
lines on the internet you like and practice playing them. I would say the most interesting improvisers have a collection of
runs and licks they make use of in various pieces rather than being totally spontaneous.
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Old 12-30-2019, 01:03 PM
JohnDWilliams JohnDWilliams is offline
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Listen to what you are playing and try to make it have a melody - try to make it sound like music. Play notes you want to hear.

It takes a lot of practice.
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Old 12-30-2019, 01:15 PM
Deliberate1 Deliberate1 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnDWilliams View Post
Listen to what you are playing and try to make it have a melody - try to make it sound like music. Play notes you want to hear.

It takes a lot of practice.
This. I am just several months into my guitar experience. But I am a jazz musician (clarinet and sax) for decades. Back in college, I started putting on records of my heros - Desmond, Stitt, Coltrain, etc. And Then I started playing along. And in time, I developed a very good ear which as served me well, since I do not read changes. But if I can hear it, I can play it.
I have already started this process with the guitar. I recently discovered Bentoina blues. And so I will put on some Youtube vids and listen for the changes. Already I am learning where the notes are on the fret board, as well as intervals, even if, at this point, I do not know the names of the notes that I am hitting. I am making music while learning the instrument, and that is what it is all about. Try it.
Best of luck.
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Old 12-30-2019, 02:37 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnDWilliams View Post
Listen to what you are playing and try to make it have a melody - try to make it sound like music. Play notes you want to hear.

It takes a lot of practice.
It helps me to "sing a melody" in my head while I'm playing it on the guitar... requires a lot of trust, but it leads to some interesting places...

Start slow, find a note that it's in your "mental" vocal range and sing it inwardly (or hum), then listen inside yourself for the next note or notes...

And it may not take you a lot of practice; one never knows about this stuff!

Above all, have fun with it! Good luck and happy improvising!
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Old 12-30-2019, 03:07 PM
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I dealt with this learning experience by imagining a person singing while I played the notes on the guitar. Especially when using the pentatonic scales. A person holds certain notes and takes breaths at times. Not all notes in a scale are created equal in that some are used to move from one good note to another good note. This is not a theoretical explanation but more of a practical out look to use while learning. The most important aspect though is your ears. Play with your ears meaning listen to what you are producing rather than just following the dots.
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Old 12-30-2019, 04:13 PM
Collingsman Collingsman is offline
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Mr Jelly is spot on. Trust your ears, but also learn about the important notes for the chord you’re playing over, for instance, emphasising the root, the third and the fifth are all no fail notes..then go beyond and above, study arpeggios .but most importantly of all make music by playing the cracks between the stones (chromatics).
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Old 12-30-2019, 04:50 PM
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It's about the only thing I CAN do. And I don't know why I can - I can't sing or hold a melody to save my life. I'm about the most limited musician I know in sooo many ways. But from the first time I learned the first pentatonic box and put on a record, I could jam with it. Just a little bit, with a few notes, but if I could figure out the right key, I could always have fun with it. First with my first cheap acoustic and then with my first electric where I could really start making it talk.

Just pretend you're having a conversation, play one lick as you, and then another as the person you're talking to. A really cool approach, when the chords work for it, is to alternate playing minor and major pentatonic. Play a lick in the minor as you talking to a woman, have her respond in the major. Or vice versa. SAY something. After a while, you won't be thinking about the notes or boxes or scales, you'll just be having a conversation. It's really fun when you're at a point when you're out jamming with people and you start having conversations with your instruments. Or debates. Or arguments. Or the old classic tension and release - more or less working toward musical orgasm.

Also, less is more a lot of the time. Listen to BB - he could do more with two or three notes than most people can do with 1000. Just grab three notes and find all of the ways you can to bend them, slide into them, use a lot of vibrato with them. Play with the dynamics of playing a looooong note followed by a quick little burst of notes. Just play. As in, just PLAY to have FUN, like a little kid plays.

It's odd how some people go right to that and others never quite can. My daughter was a concert pianist through her youth and into a musical conservancy for college. She could play the classic beautifully, with all the technique and feel you could want. I could never even imagine doing what she did every day without a thought. But I tried to play with her and get her to just improvise on some basic chord progressions and she didn't have a CLUE how to get started. Just as I wouldn't have a clue how to start playing classical piano.

BTW, I'm not claiming I'm GOOD at this - zillions of people can play rings around me. But it is something I was comfortable playing around with right away. Just loosen up, don't try too hard or be too serious about it - just have fun with it.
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Old 12-30-2019, 10:51 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sponserv View Post
…Thoughts?
Hi Ss

I always practice improvising with someone else playing so we can do call-and-answer and so we can switch taking lead or backing parts.

The other person I usually choose is better at some things than I am, and I'm better at others. We grow together and learn from each other.

I also love to watch jams - especially creative blues jams, and rock players jamming. The older and more experienced the players, the more I seem to pick up.



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Old 12-31-2019, 11:02 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sponserv View Post
Is there a point when trying to figure out improvising and phrasing where a light bulb just goes off?

I understand pentatonic boxes and adding in the blues notes, etc. But for the life of me I cannot figure out how to put a lick together that sounds good. I am NOT going to run to tab to figure it out. I am determined to figure it out myself but wow....it does not come easy to me.

Thoughts?
Learn to play tunes. I don't just mean the chord sequences to songs, I mean the melodies. Copy what singers do.
The problem for most guitarists is that they don't learn to read notation, so they never normally play melodies, the way other beginner musicians do.
For me, I happened to learn notation in school, before I was interested in music, so when I started teaching myself guitar I could learn tunes - melodies and chords - from songbooks.
I really liked melodies too - guitar instrumentals etc. I'm no singer, so the next best thing was to play the tunes on guitar.

I had no understanding at all of improvisation at that stage. When I heard it I just thought they were going crazy (in a good way!), I couldn't hear any logic to it. But the more I listened (to folk and blues mainly) - and the more I played the songs - the more I realised that improvisation was based on the notes in the chords. In blues, improvisers would play little licks in response to their vocal phrases, embellishing whatever chord they were playing with (what I found out later were) major or minor pentatonic phrases.
Then I joined a band where we'd all improvise at times, just making stuff up or messing around. It was a normal thing to do. We played mostly covers, but did them the way we felt, and also composed things of our own. It was all easy and natural. Not hard at all.

It was only looking back on it that I realised why I found it so easy: I had a store of melodic ideas in my head, from all the tunes I'd learned to play. I knew how melodies worked. I knew about phrasing, I knew how the tunes fitted the chords. It was easy to make up my own phrases the same way. It was a vocabulary. You can't speak a language without any vocabulary! The vocabulary you need is not notes and scales - that's just the alphabet. You need phrases - and you get those by stealing them from melodies and other solos.

I'm not saying I was a great improviser! My technique was crude, and my ideas were limited (I'd learned dozens of tunes, but not 100s). But the principle was obvious, not mysterious or difficult in any way. I probably used the same kinds of licks all the time, because they worked - e.g., major pentatonic on major chords was a no-brainer, easy and always sounded right. But it was that store of learned melody that informed the process. I knew what I was supposed to be doing.
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Old 12-31-2019, 11:21 AM
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Here is a video with some ideas (helpful if you are not already doing this sort of thing):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si5jx1uEIF4

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Old 12-31-2019, 02:14 PM
FrankHudson FrankHudson is offline
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Different things work for different people, but many upthread are making what is a generally useful point: melodies are important in improvising "lead guitar."

Like Ray upthread--well maybe more so--I'm a poor singer. But thinking like a singer is a great way to think about melody improvising.

The other person upthread who developed his soloing by learning melodies until the shape, phrasing and harmonic relationships became familiar to him is a classic approach helpful to many.

A weird exercise I'd do when I was trying to develop my chops was to play another familiar-to-me melody over a completely different chord sequence. I didn't go for complex changes when doing this, though maybe advanced players could progress to those eventually. While doing this exercise I wasn't aiming to play "outside" or do a Charles Ives tribute, the aim was to reshape the melody to fit. This seemed to activate my inner ear-mind as I would have to--in real time--figure out how to move the general contour of the melody into the foreign changes.
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Old 12-31-2019, 02:58 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sponserv View Post
Is there a point when trying to figure out improvising and phrasing where a light bulb just goes off?

I understand pentatonic boxes and adding in the blues notes, etc. But for the life of me I cannot figure out how to put a lick together that sounds good. I am NOT going to run to tab to figure it out. I am determined to figure it out myself but wow....it does not come easy to me.

Thoughts?
First if it were easy there would be no Guitar hero's

That said :
Quote:
Originally Posted by Collingsman View Post
Mr Jelly is spot on. Trust your ears, but also learn about the important notes for the chord you’re playing over, for instance, emphasising the root, the third and the fifth are all no fail notes..then go beyond and above, study arpeggios .but most importantly of all make music by playing the cracks between the stones (chromatics).
To add to the above . Something that helped me a bunch was told to me by my teacher when I went to him to learn to play lead. Don't just noodle up and down the full Pentatonic scale , but rather start by playing short partial pentatonic runs (licks) 2-4 notes, BUT by trying to land (finnish) the partial run, on the root. While the chord progression is still on that root Key chord.
Get that down first , then move to trying to start either "ending" or starting subsequent runs corresponding to the root note of the next chord in the progression while it is playing and so on.

For example if the progression is D_G_A a (1-4-5 progression) with D being the key of the song and the root of scale , then try to END the first lick on a D note. Then perhaps start and or end the next lick on a G note when the G chord is playing etc. Then as Collingsman noted start experimenting with associated chromatics in the key adding them (often as short expressive transition slides in between the pentatonic notes)
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Old 01-01-2020, 09:41 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by KevWind View Post
Don't just noodle up and down the full Pentatonic scale , but rather start by playing short partial pentatonic runs (licks) 2-4 notes, BUT by trying to land (finnish) the partial run, on the root. While the chord progression is still on that root Key chord.
Get that down first , then move to trying to start either "ending" or starting subsequent runs corresponding to the root note of the next chord in the progression while it is playing and so on.
This is good.

Remember there are five ( 5 ) notes in the pentatonic scale. Per octave. Major or minor. When you change octaves you are playing the same notes only in a different octave. So playing allot of notes is just plan playing allot of notes. Look at the chord you may be playing over at any one time. Think about how many measures or how long you may be playing over that chord. You can look at it as though you are playing around the root note of the chord with other notes. Only to change to another root note to play around when the chord you are playing over changes. These types of thoughts are for learning and become instinct over time. You'll find that your ear draws you to the root note every so often by instinct. Go with it.

An aside note here. I used to use a trick when I played in bands that did allot of improvisation. After playing for hours, long gigs, I needed something different than what I was doing just for my own creativeness. I'd start a lead run and stop in the middle of it. I'd pause long enough to make it feel uncomfortable. Like I screwed up. Every eye in the bar would look to see what happened. To look at the guitar player that screwed up. Their ears were calling for a resolution to what I had set up. They felt it. Then I'd finish it. I'd resolve it. Everyone felt it and went on content that all is right in the world.
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Old 01-02-2020, 06:35 AM
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Go to activemelody.com...I joine two years ago...you want to learn to improvise and WHY you are doing it?? this guy is it....check it out...really.
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