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.
It only takes a single note to change the minor pentatonic scale into the “blues scale.” And what a world of difference that one note can make! As in the previous lessons in this series, we’ll provide you with MP3 sound files in order to help you create your own solos.
Last time out we sampled the different flavors the major and minor pentatonic scales offered us as tools for soloing over blues progressions. While each had its owns merits, we can create an even more tasteful (not to mention useful) solo when we combine the major scale with the blue note elements of its own minor pentatonic. Come listen!
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.
We’re working with some of our favorite melodies, to figure what they do, so we can do them, to craft our own melodies. Makes sense, right?
Great melodies often use a lot of repetition. How can we take a melody and play around with it without playing the exact same thing over and over?
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.
There is more to playing guitar than memorizing guitar scales. Here are some examples of how you can use scales to spice up your playing.
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.