Guitar Noise

While it’s vital to use a chord progression to help you decide on a scale, knowing the style or feel of both a song and a scale is just as important. This lesson focuses on the minor pentatonic scale and why it is used so much for blues (and other genres) in major keys.

After spending our last lesson looking at all the notes in a scale, this time we’re going to just look at a few. One of the best things you can do to get going as a soloist is to minimize the number of notes you use in a solo. Focusing on one, two, three or four notes will help you on both rhythm and phrasing, which make a solo a lot more interesting than just stringing as many notes together as fast as you can.

Putting together solos is not easy for a lot of people, and the conventional teaching (”just use your scales”) doesn’t always make sense when you’re just starting out. In this, the first of a series of articles, we take a listen to the differences in tonal color between the major scale and the major pentatonic.

This is a tutorial on improvising over the ii V I chord progression. Jazz players may immediately recognize this type of progression, but it occurs in all kinds of music. Getting to recognize it so that you can be ready to solo is just the starting point.

In his follow up to the basics of soloing, Josh demonstrates the major scale and the pentatonic and their usefulness in helping you improve your lead playing.

Josh Urban takes you through the very first steps of soloing, making the process a little less mysterious than many of us think it is! And less scary, too…

Our favorite arranger of Celtic music takes a short summer vacation and brings Guitar Noise readers a little bag of rock guitar riffs based on repeated phrases of notes. These are easy, fun and will add some spice to your soloing. Enjoy!

The rock solo is in some ways the quintessential guitar sound. The dream of playing one really great solo is more or less why we keep strapping up and plugging in. Since the number of really great guitarists is much greater than the length of time given to write an article, we’ll focus here on a few really fantastic players and then discuss how those players inspire us.

Arjen has an ambitious project for the New Year - a series of pieces on improvisation. This first lesson introduces the form of the twelve bar blues, the minor pentatonic scale and the blues scale. There are exercises and even some MIDI backing tracks that you can practice along with!

Let’s take some of the things we’ve discussed in past columns and see them put to good use. If you’d like, you can even learn how to play Lindsay Buckingham’s solo from the original recording of Landslide. But you’ve got to promise to learn something.

Guitar Noise favorite Gilbert Isbin brings us a second lesson in finger-style guitar. In this piece, we use the first phrase of Jimi Hendrix’s classic Little Wing to learn about finger positioning and developing improvisational skills.

Randell’s second piece for Guitar Noise delves into the nuts and bolts of creating interesting solos. He has a refreshing philosophy on the subject, and I think you’ll appreciate his quality over quantity approach. Learn why speed isn’t always your best friend and that having a melody will ultimately be more important than flying through a scale.

Here’s a thoughtful, step-by-step guide to improvisation based upon chord shapes. It’s a terrific way for the solo player to learn the fretboard.

Here are seven rules on soloing that help you play killer solos without having to think too much about them.

Today we’re going to look at serial compositions. Let’s see how we can take a set of numbers and derive a musical motif from it.

Scales are much more than a run of notes. Learning how they work is useful for all sorts of things, including writing your own guitar riffs.

Thematic improvisation occurs when playing becomes based on musical ideas that we pull from the head. Matt Butler explains in this first of two parts.

Improvising is basically composing on the fly. To do this you will need a fairly deep understanding of harmony and compositional techniques.