How Does A Guitar Player... Just Play???

Geoo, As far as playing up the neck, there are the moveable scales, and pentatonic “boxes” that you can memorize and those can be found I'm sure in this site and just about any guitar website if you poke around and do a search under scales. It is essential to memorize these and practice regularly.
But you can also help yourself to learn the fretboard better by just making your own scales from low to high. What I did just as an experiment was to take for example G major. Find the lowest occurance of it (3rd fret, low E string) and the highest (15th fret, high E string) and figure out different ways to get from one to the other. It helps to write it out on neck paper (found on this site under downloads I believe, no need to actually buy any, though you can if you'd like.) Just lightly pencil in all the G's for example to give you a reference then just connect the dots in several ways going through G, A B C D E F# G several times before hitting the high G. Each day play a different version of it, and try to think about what notes you are hitting as well as just memorizing the pattern. You can of course do this major, minor, whatever key.
I should mention that at first I think it is not a good idea to overwhelm yourself trying to memorize too much at once. This is why it's good to memorize just the major and pentatonic patterns first and just play them over and over. I hope I'm not making it sound far too complicated.

Does anyone have any cool sounding stuff out there that they could share? I know with tab, there is no sense of timing, but some metal improvising tab would help. Thanks.

It's not improvising if it's tabbed out... but you can learn different styles by learning riffs from various artists that have their own sound.

After reading all the posts in this thread I'd have to say the best things I've read is to simply play scales over rhythm patterns and songs. I know there are some Jam Tracks and Jam-A-Long Tracks out there. Last month's Guitar One had a BB King song less his guitar. While the tab was there if you wanted to sound like BB, you didn't have to play that, just play a scale in the correct key that sounds good... and make up your own. You'll only learn by trial and error.

Same with the Jam-A-Long books/CD's from Hal Leonard/Music Dispatch... only there you get two recordings of the song, one with and one without the lead guitar. Many styles of music is available too. I've recently purchased a few books to check the quality and use for myself and some easier ones as a lesson plan with students.

I must say I'm very satisfied. Some of the books/CD's that they are advertising in the guitar mags are not yet available, which you will find out when you go to the website.

Find their ad and look up books/CD's by product number seems to be the best way to go, as their internal search engine is questionable.

I think Jonnyt is right. If you don't do something with the scales they will always sound like scales and not like music. I clearly don't spend enough time doing this but just playing around with a scale and a backing track can lead to those "lightbulb experiences" where you begin to see the connection between a scale and a solo. You won't become Vai overnight (in my case probably not in three lifetimes) but you get a little more insight into the process. As always, it's hard to describe in words, it's just a practice issue.

Well, for me practicing scales has never been going up and down them in order (chromatically?). If I'm learning a new one I'll go through it in high to low order for memorization, but after 10 minutes of working through a pattern to get the gist of it I start experimenting. Seeing what intervals sound good and start visualizing where the notes should be. I can sort of "see" the note I want and start to reach for it. Then I start hearing something in my head and I'll try and peice it together using the scale. If I can find a starting point picking out the interval is easy for me.

I don't know if that last bit I mentioned is something you could practice and learn, but it gives you an idea of what I experience when I improv.

Thanks for all the help. All of the advice sure sheds some light on the topic. I know the G major scale and C major scale. They just don't sound rock/metal enough. I guess I want to improvise down the neck around the 10th to 15th frets using the bottom 3 or 4 strings. Something like Metallica's solos. Or Slash's solos. You guys know what I mean. Thanks.

Yes blues can help a lot!
At least it did for me

What was cool when I started to improvise (I'm still a beginner) over Arjens lesson was that I first thought"maybe I can play for a few minutes without running out of ideas".
Well actually you find yourself playing, practicing, incorporating, finding out, getting more and more ideas and everything that means "playing" in the practical meaning and in no time an hour has passed. That exactly happened to me :D
You can practice thousand scales and thousand chromatic scales and another thousand different licks but they ain't worth S*** if you just don't know what to do with them

i think blues really helps with improvisation. 8)

Yeah, I started out with pentatonic blues shuffles. Just spending that first twenty minutes soloing over a song was the single biggest jump I've made in my playing.

Excuse me if I get this quote thing messed up.

Anyways, yeah, I showed my guitar teacher the rythm section to purple haze and he gave me the e minor pentatonic scale and I just got it. It was amazing, I just solo'd like that! And it was my first guitar lesson with him! :)

Also, I might not have much respect for Korn(numetal), yngie maimlsteen, etc.etc. but I do have respect for Tony Iommi because sabbath's probably the only metal band im gonna ever really like, and Steve Vai, because although hes metal, he has respect for Clapton, SRV, all these other great musicians and thats cool. 8) Sorry, off topic.

Learning the major and Minor Pentatonic scales will help you alot, Like everyone said you can apply these scales to most music and learn to play the scales with the chords that are in the song without using Tabs, You will feel much better to just listen to a song a figure out something that fits even if it don't sound exactly like the guitat player in the song as long as it fits it works and you have just created something of your own and then that makes you unique, learn those scales and learn the chords to each key major and minor, the relative minor of each key is great for starting a lead. major and minor scales are realy the same what makes the diffrence is which note you start on. it falls into place after you learn the scales once you master those you can do alot of stuff. Have fun with it.

:D