How do you get that improvised sound that you hear in so many great guitar solos? These lessons dealing with creating your own solos and improvising on guitar. Beginners will probably want to check out the Beginner’s Guide To Soloing series. If you’ve already spent some time on guitar scales, you’ll probably benefit from the series Turning Scales into Solos.
Creating expressive solos involves a lot more than playing a lot of notes. One of the best ways to practice expressiveness is to use just a handful of notes, as Tom Hess demonstrates in his latest article. This lesson includes a great tutorial video as well.
Here’s a scale exercise you might especially helpful if you’re interested in improvisation, especially modal improvisation.
The pentatonic scale is, without doubt, one of the guitarist’s chief tools. Modes, on the other hand, can be confusing. Paul Tauteroff shows how guitar players who are already familiar with the pentatonic scale can learn and utilize the modes in their lead guitar playing.
Quite often, guitarists solo as if they are paid by the note, totally ignoring phrasing and melody, two key aspects of soloing. Tom Hess gives us a terrific lesson on phrasing, complete with video!
In our latest lesson in this series, we look at a basic rock progression and examine the choices we can make in terms of scales for soloing. Plus we get a look at the Mixolydian mode as well as discovering a new use for the Dorian.
Let’s offer a warm “welcome back” to Nick, who brings us a look at the interlocking relationship of three important creative aspects of musicianship – improvising, composing and transcribing – and how you can use them to move up from being someone who just dabbles with the guitar to a serious musician.
Before moving onward with modes, it’s important to grasp the concept of “target” notes as well as to understand that a target note doesn’t have to be a part of the chord in a chord progression. Here we’ll look at how single notes can used to create far more interesting solos than simply using “safe” notes.
Knowing a single major scale opens the world of modal soloing to you, if you know how to read the signs. We’ll take a look at how to recognize when to use the Dorian scale, and also take a moment or two to compare and contrast it with the minor pentatonic scale.