What's your approach for basic improvising? (I know the 5 pentatonic shapes)

[MICHAEL MYERS]

Hey,

I've learnt the 5 pentatonic shapes and have been using different keys for playing them over.

I just wondered if anyone had any tips for basic improvising. I'm never going to be able to play jazz, but I'm interested in rock and blues.

Is listening and working stuff out the best way?

Michael.

[stanron]

Listening and working stuff out is the first step on a journey. Later steps include being able to reproduce a range of solos you think are good, replacing learned solos with your own, producing stuff that you think is as good or better than stuff you thought was good and then beyond.

How well you do will depend on two or three main areas of ability.

First guitar playing technical skills. This will include right hand and left hand skills and your vocabulary of 'licks'.

Second (and a lot of people will put this first) theoretical knowedge. This includes music theory, fretboard awareness, modes, anthropology, multicultural awareness, life, the universe and everything. The first three of these are important if you want to play jazz today but as you say you don't want to do this you could probably leave this second group and concentrate on what I think is the most important, the third area.

Third. The ability to imagine music and tranfer what you imagine to your fingers and your guitar. Listening and working stuff out is the start of this. The more you practice imagining music and playing it the better and faster it will become. This is a bit difficult to describe but it is possible to imagine a section of music which will take several seconds to perform in no time at all. And then play it. Easier is anticipating a point in a musical piece and working out, or imagining, what to play there.

Good luck.

[Bob Womack]

I wrote an article on soloing that covered a lot of approach considerations. You can find it on my website, HERE. Hope it is useful!

Bob

[815C]

One of the best things you can do is to strum the chords you want to improvise over and hum or sing the solo you'd like to play over it. Then go back and figure out where those notes are that you hummed/sang.

Learning a little music theory will help a lot, as will learning other folks licks and solos. Throw in a bit of scale practice and/or a fiddle tune or two to get your technique in shape.

If you go to my blog, Guitar Planet, and scroll down to the post titled "Using the theory of relativity to increase efficiency in improvisation" (the post is nowhere as weird as the title), you can read about an approach I use that has helped me a lot - practicing improvisation in SLOW MOTION.

[Hotspur]

Originally Posted by 815C

One of the best things you can do is to strum the chords you want to improvise over and hum or sing the solo you'd like to play over it. Then go back and figure out where those notes are that you hummed/sang.

I want to second this advice.

Working on your ear is a crucial part of learning to improvise. If you haven't worked on your ear, then usually when you're improvising it's a physical thing - you're focused on moving your fingers around within a specific shape.

Whereas if you have a good ear, you're focused on MUSICAL ideas. 815C's comment is a way to nudge you towards thinking musically, rather than physically.

(For what it's worth, I tend to recommend people NOT learn all five minor pentatonic positions right away. Learn one - and then focus on what you hear. Over time, you can learn all five - but learning all five at once puts a lot of emphasis on the physical, whereas limiting yourself to one forces you to think musically in order to be interesting, while simplifying what your fingers have to do so you can think about it less).

[soma5]

It is my opinion, for better or worse, that improvisation has two basic components. One is hearing the notes you want to play, inside you. The other is being able to play exactly those notes just the way you heard them.

The second one is certainly teachable, but in my teaching I've found that students consistently over-estimate their ability to play what they hear, so I start with simple songs that everyone knows and have them play them in various keys and places on the fretboard. The first one is harder; I believe that that comes from listening to lots of music and thinking about what you heard and how it makes you feel. The best improvisors do something entirely new and wonderful, but they all seem to have gotten there by listening to those who came before them.

[mr. beaumont]

Record the chords to a song...sing a solo over the chord changes (doesn't matter if you have a good voice) and record that too.

Then go back and learn what you sang on the guitar. It'll take a long time before you can do that on the fly, but teaching yourself to hear and visualize simultaneously is the ultimate goal.

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by MICHAEL MYERS

Hey,

I've learnt the 5 pentatonic shapes and have been using different keys for playing them over.

I just wondered if anyone had any tips for basic improvising. I'm never going to be able to play jazz, but I'm interested in rock and blues.

Is listening and working stuff out the best way?

Michael.

Hi Michael...

I'd add that you need to listen to some great solo rock or blues guitarists (or guitar solos by great players) and begin to allow them to infuse your brain. Try to isolate a couple key elements of their licks and imitate them...

Just plunking around with pentatonic scale patterns doesn't produce tasty guitar solos - actually they become monotonous to the audience very fast. Pentatonic is easy because technically there are no wrong notes when you play them in key.

My experience says when there are no 'wrong' notes to play, there are few carefully chosen ones in the mix either…

[shawlie]

There's a fun book called "Chord-Tone Soloing", it might be worth looking at. It has you think about targeting certain notes at certain times, lots of excercises with arpeggios (sic?).

I am going through it once in a while and it seems like a nice approach. Not a lot of riffs or licks, but more of a few ideas on how to make a bunch of notes sound more like a solo. It is not a fix-all or anything, but got me thinking about a lot of things. Fun book - might not be up your alley, but might be helpful for new ideas.

[Doug Young]

To me, the process of learning to improvise has 3 stages or levels, and many people are touching on them here.

Stage 1 is learning scales, etc, some formula for finding the "right" notes that are available. That includes the chord tones approach, scales, and so on. Imagine you want to learn english, and someone gives you a dictionary of the 4000 or so words most people use everyday. You memorize them, and viola, every word you say is indeed english. Just doesn't make any sense at all, random words. A lot of guitar solos stay stuck at this level, even some stuff on well-known recordings.

Stage 2 is to put those words into correct structure, which you can do by learning the rules of grammar, or by simply copying the way other people assemble those words into sentences. You could just look thru AGF and copy random sentences from people and repeat them back. Now you actually sound like you are saying something. But of course there's no actual meaning behind the way the sentences connect - no point actually being made. On the other hand, the process of memorizing the sentences and repeating them would be very valuable - you learn subconsciously how nouns and verbs and adjectives fit together, you pick up idioms that aren't even in the rule books, and so on. Copying licks and playing them back, and progressing to where you can actually play them back at an appropriate time can create a pretty decent sounding solo. *Lots* of guitar solos stay at this level.

Stage 3 is to actually be able to have a thought and string words and sentences together in a way you've never done before - you're not copying anyone's existing sentence, you're communicating an idea. In music, at this level, you're composing a melody, and doing it on the fly. The people who do this well are few and far between, but it should be the goal. A solo isnt a fast flurry of random notes - it's a composed melody, just done on demand. You rely on those words you memorized, those sentences and idioms you memorized, but you're going a step beyond randomly selecting and regurgitating them. With great soloists like Charlie Parker, people have torn apart their solos and used segments as the starting point for new songs. I haven't played electric in years, but I can still sing many of Larry Calton's improvised solos from memory - they're amazing melodies.

Anyway, that's some philosophical thoughts. How do you apply this to something practical? You already have the 1st stage, you've memorized some scales. Now go learn lots of licks and try to understand how others have assembled those notes. Learn whole solos that you like, then go back and tear apart every lick. Learn each lick in different keys, play them backwards. Change the rhythms, make major licks minor and vice-versa, try to "own" the licks. Next (stage 3), try to actually compose some solos the way you would an instrumental piece of music. Write the solo out, memorize it. Do that over and over - there's no way you can compose a great melody on the fly if you can't do it slowly with the ability to plan and edit it. Above all, just do it over and over, get some jam tracks to play with and do all this stuff with them for thousands of hours, and you'll get there!

[71jasper]

Well, I haven't done it in years, but when I used to play in bands and it came time for an improvised solo I did this:

I closed my eyes and hit a random note somewhere in the middle of the fingerboard. If it didn't sound good I moved almost immediately to another note. If that sounded good I held it for a few beats while I let my imagination take it in a logical direction within the context of the chords, and my fingers followed my imagination. Some results were better than others, but none were bad. I didn't know scales, modes - nothin'. I just knew what was in my head and that's what I played.

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by Doug Young

To me, the process of learning to improvise has 3 stages or levels, and many people are touching on them here.

Hi Doug...

Well put sir!

[MICHAEL MYERS]

Thanks for all the replies guys.

I'm going to put these strategies to work.