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Guitar Improvisation

CrashBandicoot Girl

I want to improve my guitar improvisation skills but I don't really know how to go about it. If you could give me some advice on it, it would be greatly appreciated also any tips for improving lead guitar in general.

At the moment Im just messing around hoping for the best and learning some scales.

Thankyou

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martinedwards

Free lessons at the Jam Session forum.......

http://www.zentao.com/guitar/

18AD

What style are you improvising in? It kind of depends what your aiming for.

CrashBandicoot Girl

Style is mainly blues and classic rock if that helps

Chachi

I would start by learning the Pentatonic Scale if you don't already know it. It's the basis for almost all classic rock and blues improvisation/soloing and is generally the first scale that guitar players learn. It is essentially a slimmed down version of the major scale, containing only 5 notes as apposed to 7.

18AD

Definitely learn some scales.

For a blues you can stick to the pentatonic scale if you're just beginning.

I'd recommend coming up with, say, three little lines in the pentatonic scale that you like and can play well and apply these to a chord progression. Alternatively you can take some lines from songs you like and apply them in different ways yourself.

Either get yourself a loop pedal so you can record backing loops or find some online. I think bandinabox is a program that you can make your own backing tracks with. There are possibly others I haven't heard about.

For example:

So for this one you'd need to know or have a line you can play in A minor pentatonic, G major pentatonic, D minor pentatonic and F major pentatonic. (I'm just using pentatonic as an example and a good place to start from. There're loads more options you can use).

This is in 6/8 time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNFX65nyY50

For this you'll need a line in A minor pentatonic, D minor pentatonic and E major pentatonic.

Over these things play your licks that you learnt before hand. When you can play the stuff you already know over the progression start to play with them a bit, adding a note or two or changing the rhythm of the line you already know. You can use the "same" minor pentatonic line over any minor chord. So you could play the line over A minor and D minor but you have to transpose it, move it to the desired scale.

The trick to improvising is that you actually know lots of things you can play over a given chord progression. It's not as "make it up as you go along" as you might think.

Hope that helps.