Hi lee recently I bought your guitar theory book and I think this is a very nice good for me.
I am a intermediate guitar player and I have read some chapter in this book.I have a question that I have know lots of things inside but I still don’t have any idea that to improvising with jamtrack.Everything played by me always just sounds like playing scale and boring…. I have some friends beside me who also play guitar I can make sue they know very less theory but they can play very well and have lots of idea when improvising .Is that mean I might have no talent on this
thank you so much.
Hi Zhen.
Definitely not “no talent”. The theory and everything is great to know and comes in very useful but mostly this kind of thing is down to practising, experimenting, learn a bunch of licks, try transposing or learning a few transcribed solos and then practise like there’s no tomorrow.
The main thing with practice is to make sure you actually learn or improve at something everyday, no matter how small. I haven’t heard you play but my gut feeling is that you are probably doing what many people do – improvise over a jam track simply repeating the same stuff you do all of the time – that’s just replication, you aren’t learning anything.
Next time you fire up a jam track, simplify things. Play something so simple that you have no option but to find some way to make it sound good. For example, pick a small group of four notes – you can use slides, bends, palm muting, 1/4, 1/8th and 16th notes, but you can’t stray from the same four notes. Do this for an hour and you will be forced to do something different, don’t stop until what you are doing could pass as a 12 bar solo.
Then do other simple things, play only on one string for 20 minutes or whatever. Spend 10 minutes doing nothing but sliding into and / or bending a single note.
There are endless things you can do like this but the main thing about restricting or limiting your ideas will force you into doing what you probably don’t do enough of already, listening with more focus. The biggest thing I think that separates an amateur solo is too many step-wise notes, i.e., just picking back and forth between scale notes – and not enough space in the playing. Space doesn’t have to be moments of silence, although it can, sometimes it just needs to be about giving the ears some variation. You should be able to pull off a passable 12 bar solo using just a few notes all on one string using nothing but 1/4 and 18th notes, some slides and note bending. Practice doing just that until it sounds OK. Once you get one idea sounding good, the rest of the fretboard should start to open up for you.
I’ve got tons going on at the moment but I’m working on various articles at the moment, this is one of the subjects I want to deal with. It might be a few weeks to a few months but stay tuned.
If you can, send me some audio of your playing.
