most blues courses teach note for note soloing and they teach some excellent solos yet making up my own don’t sound so polished i find it easier and more full filling .Am i missing out if i give up learning note for note transcriptions for example.
Although I very rarely do this myself, I think you can get a lot out of transcribed solos. If nothing else they get you used to playing something that works, which ultimately should be helping to train your ears and develop some sort of playing style. The thing is you need to break the solos down, understand what’s going on in them and experiment – learn to re-use them.
You could for example, take one or two bars of the transcribed solo and try to make it work over different backing tracks. Often it won’t sound quite right so you then experiment and find a way to make it fit. You can then do the opposite, maybe something like improvise over bars 1 to 4 but keep play the transcribed part over bars 5 and 6. Then switch that round – play the transcribed part bars 1 to 4, improvise 5 and 6… and so on.
This creates some sort of familiarity and connection between your own playing style and somebody else’s. This is quite powerful because as you learn to “fuse” them together they should eventually even out into something that sounds good and has your own style mixed in. Obviously this doesn’t happen overnight and that’s why you should do it everyday until you notice a change in your playing.
It’s all about experimenting and playing along to backing tracks (assuming you practice alone) but you have to keep doing it over and over.
Spend the whole of one week with just one solo and keep looking for ways to mess around with it. Steal licks from other solos and try to make them fit. It’s all about finding new ideas and playing around with them, but do it so often that they become kind of habitual, an automatic response in your playing.
Probably the biggest reason for being stuck in a rut or feeling like you are progressing too slowly is you are not actually learning anything new, you are just memorising a set of finger movements. We all do it, I’ve done it in the past and many others do the same.
Coincidentally this is along the lines of the book I’m currently working on. It’s just going to be a whole bunch of minor pentatonic scale runs and licks along with some 12 bar exercise style solos which are intended to give you ideas of how to experiment and get used to applying things. It won’t be in-depth, mostly tabs, so I’ll be putting up an article to go alongside it. I’m hoping to get that done in the next few weeks.
