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Originally Posted by delpreston47
Thanks guys, that helps me out alot! I really appreciate also your advice golden ears, I guess that I'm too concerned with theory and don't focus enough on emotion and the feeling behind the music. How can I practice getting good with messing around with these tactics? Is there anything that you've particularly done? I just want to get better, but my practice sessions are getting more and more halfassed... I try to learn songs, which I do, and then I do some scale runs. If ya got any more input I'd totally apreciate it. Once again thank you for your wordds of inspiration. I guess its easy for me to get so lost in the mathmatics and theory along with being ompletely overwhelmed and I just get more overwhelmed.
Thanks
-Del
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Your totally welcome, I am glad that I inspired you!
Here is some more advice. Ironically, I was talking to one of my online students yesterday about the same subject and he has always been into theory and has acheived a decent grasp of it. I have taught him about many things like the basics of song writing, sound enginneering, what songs to cover at a gig etc etc etc. but most of all stuff about playing lead.
He has a tremendous amount of respect for me but yesterday he was on a high created by some of his most recent theory studies and decided to get a little ****y with me and got straightened out really fast, when he found that his little challenges with theory verses natural talent, led him to getting smoked in a debate and then to top it off, he sent me a sound file with a very strange semi complex chord change and challenged me to tell him the key it was in. The change included many chords and suggested several resolutions and without an instrument in my hand, or any use of theory, I was able to tell him the key in about 20 seconds, while taking into account that he was not tuned to 440 all based on "perfect pitch" (which means that I can name a note or frequency without reference to an instrument in most cases) and natural talent combined with some common sense.
Anyways I mention this conversation because it really got me thinking about how to explain how I look at soloing and also reminded me of a very important Mark Twain quote, while thinking about how we grow as musicians...."Education is the road from ****y ignorance to worried uncertainty". Now I am guessing that Mark Twain was referring to all forms of education, not just formal and as we age if we live as thinkers, we are learning many new things each and everyday and with everything we learn, wether it be about music or any subject, it opens up an expodential amount of doors to things that we do not know.
This way of thinking once understood, will increase a persons confidence because they will then be living consiously and become realistic about what they know and don't know and with music this allows us to grasp onto what we do know and use it to the max, while we are continuously developing what we don't know.
It is very liberating to take this approach because it takes the pressure off and lets us enjoy each stage of our progression. And I don't care how advanced the player is and this includes all the greats, in the scheme of what their is to know and considering what each player already knows, we all know very little. Now this is a wonderful thing because if music was finite instead of infinite, there would be an end to an experts learning and that would be a very sad and lonely place to be. Each player from the beginner to expert has just as much potential learning to do in relation to the infinite world of music!
That being said I really enjoyed what MJK said about working with one note then expanding outwards, what he is saying runs in parallel to my education expanation, he is demonstrating and by the way I do this all the time myself, that you can play a great solo with the most basic things, using only a tiny piece of the knowledge that you already have attained about music.
K I will stop philosophing and get on with some direct soloing tips lol.
Melodie is Melodie whether it is played on a guitar, violin, piano or sung by a great singer. A great solo should be based on Melodie as much as possible and of course scales, combinations of scales, modes, triads, arpegios etc etc etc. can be used in a beautiful way to connect the dots, by dots I mean connecting the melodic sections of the solo.
Whether I am improvising or composing a solo, I break the parts down naturally into various categories, the same way I do while composing a song because if composed correctly, they should be able to stand alone as a composition onto themselves.
Here is one example of the way my mind composes a solo and this is not something that I often think about consiously or something that I base on theory consciously unless once again I hit a brick wall.
In this example and there are endless examples, I would start a solo with a great hook like the beginning of a song, then get into the body of the solo which could be compared to a verse of a song, then there is usually the part that is building to a climax section, which could be compared to the bridge of a song or the middle eight and then there is the climax which is like the choros of a song, then finally there is the carry over, meaning the part that brings you back into the vocal and could be compared to the fade out or ending of a song, even though you may not be fading out the notes, it could suggest a fade out feel as the solo merges with the vocal.
Now just like song writing there is no set formula but your instincts should take you in a direction that creates a feel whether it be one of longing which is one of my favorites and means to create notes that make you feel like you are waiting for something to happen, then finally you give it to them. Or it could be an uplifting exciting feel that carries you away right off the bat and leads to an almost orgasmic feel from beginning to end. There are endless ways to approach this but just like MJK made reference to sex, I also with very few exceptions play my guitar as though I am having sex with a girl, unless I am playing an "Open Solo", where I am the entire orchastra within myself with my guitar as my conduit, I still make sure that I have a great compostition but I will get alot more wild and expressive and usually do this through alot of melodic flash because with an open solo your goal is often to excite people and in order to do this you don't have to follow the same rules that you would while playing during a song and of course there are no boundries if there are no other instruments to control your key or rythm.
I had said earlier that Melodie is Melodie whether it is played on a guitar, violin, piano or sung by a person. This is the most essential thing to focus on!
While a singer is writing a melodie, unless they are writing opera or something that is restrictive in its nature, and they don't have a fret board or keyboard to look at, they only have there imagination and there vocal chords and vocal chords do not have little dots or white and black keys to tell them what notes they are preforming lol, so they have to rely on inspiration and feel.
There is very little difference in my opinion between this and playing a great solo. When Jazz players and old 50,s rock players played a solo, it was almost always an extension of the songs melodie, this is for the most part a lost art but is a technique that should be a huge player in our bag of tricks.
When you listen to a Melodie of a great Beatles song, you are not listening to a mode or scale, even though it can be dedused to that on paper, you are listening to a beautiful melodie that harnesses the use of many notes that relate to various scales and cannot be pinned down to just one pattern in most cases. And I highly doubt that the Beatles were masters of theory, yet they created music that will go down in history along with Mozzart, Beethoven and the other classical greats. Birds sing beautful melodies every day and you don't see little glasses on them with a music stand in front of them lol.
Now when you sing or hum you can get out any note that you imagine because you know your voice box in side out, even if you are not a great singer with magical tone, you can find the notes you imagine.
With a guitar it is important and this is something that I have achieved and that is to be able to play your guitar with the ease of whistling or singing a melodie. Once you can do this, you can toss the theory aside and just play away in key and melodically at your leasure! Now of course some things that you come up with won't work and sometimes even when we know it won't work, we keep pounding our heads off that "brick wall" instead of being honest with ourselves and saying you know what this sucks!!!! and changing directions.
Here are some tips on how to learn your fretboard like you know your own vocal chords:
First of all, listen to a song that you want to solo over and hum a great melodie then translate it onto the guitar. This will not only help you to come up with great parts but it will also help you to learn how to translate what you are thinking to your fret board and each time this will become easier and easier until you can just "humm" on the guitar without the vocal step.
Scatting is a great way to learn how to do this. Scatting for those of you who are not familiar with it, is when a guitar player sings along to his solo in what seems to be real time but in fact it often is not. If you take a pattern, run or what have you and sing along with it just milliseconds behind the guitar, you will sound as though you know every note on your neck as you sing and play them at seemingly the same time, when in fact you are just repeating with your voice what you hear so quickly that no one will know!
In time you will not need this slight hesitation because after months or years depending on your talent level of doing this, you will know longer need the delay and you will actually be scatting.
Scatting will get you to know your neck so well that once again, you will be able to "humm" or "sing with your guitar. This will remove so many boundries that you will be astounded at the results. I started doing this as a young boy and it has been a great asset.
Another cool thing that I do and I have also hear Strat78 mention this, is to every once in a while limit yourself to a blues box and with those very few notes, you force yourself to create a great solo using things like great combinations of those few notes in all the octaives available, along with nice bends of every type imaginable and of course with great varying vibratos
When using vibrato people tend to just do the same one over and over again and they start to sound like a bad singer on the guitar lol. and this gets very very boring. A great singer like
Robert Plant, seldom uses the same vibrato twice. With the completion of each section of a solo, the feel is different and so is what the backing music is doing which calls for a different vibrato. Use these varying vibratos well and let the feel of the song dictate what you play not some technique that you have developed, use the various vibrato techniqes that you have learned to allow you to vary your vibrato naturally, rather than basing your vibrato on a technique.
Now there is another variable that cannot be controlled in terms of what it has to offer and can be a wonderful asset and this variable is the one that a guitar dictates based on its tuning and the open string notes that it provides.
Many incredible runs like the first run in Van Halens "I AM THE ONE" are based on open strings. Eddie was playing in the A position and likely had an inspiration perhaps based on the triplet feel of the run and he then likely proceeded to jam out that run which includes the use of open strings. I doubt that he new exactly what was going to come out of it, until it happened but got lucky and stubbled into a really cool fill. Chicken picking is something that I do quite a bit of and that incorporates alot of open strings and when you are improvising like that, many cool melodies pop up by accident because when improvising and combining open strings at the same time at a high speed, you are not always going to know what something will sound like until it happens.
So there is the accidental creation aspect that is a part of every players bag of tricks and it happens to the best of us and the worse of us lol. And it happens for many reasons beyond my open string example.
After you play long enough you will accidentally bump into fills that have already been done by someone else as you doddle on your guitar. This happens to me every once and a while and its a pretty fun thing to have happen. You are not trying to do it but the next thing you know you are playing some classic fill by accident, one that you have never played before. This same concept helps us to accidentally create original stuff as well and should be taken seriously because in the end it does not matter how you come up with a great fill or solo, it just matters that it is great!
Starting from any position,
Another thing that I do and it has really helped me to develop my ability to improvise over the years, is to not ask or pay attention to what key I am in when I start soloing. If you think about it, it really doesn't matter as long as you can play along. Say that a guitar player is dropped tuned three semi tones and he says that he is playing in the key of E, it is not really E it is now D and if you were trying to play along based on finding a D position you would have to know this. The Key of E by any other name is still the same frequency, so we should not get to rapped up in the names of things but more into what they really are.
So this is how I do it.....I hear a chord change and because I have perfect pitch I can hear a note immediately that will work, so I start with that note and begin a solo without paying attention to the key I am in, for those of you that do not have perfect pitch slide up the neck until you land on a note that works then continue. This will be musical and work just as well as the perfect pitch way. Now this is where I combine the scatting behind the music thing (we are talking milliseconds) with what my ear tells me should come next. This is something that can be done without knowing what chords are to come next because you are playing ever so slightly behind the music to assist you with this, just like the how to learn how to scatt explanation. Now just close your eyes and let your hands wander around creating there magic, your ears will tell you if you need to make the next note a whole step or a half step or what have you and if you make a mistake you turn it around with the phraze conclusion by using a combination of notes that resolves your mistake and therefor the mistake will not be perceived as one. Quite often mistakes are the beginning of the best things we have ever come up with!
The whole idea of playing without knowing what key you are in will help you in many ways two of which are: If you are playing live and a song comes up that you do not know you will be able to get by and also if you are playing over a complex chord change, where the key may not give you enough information for you to be able to improvise without these natural abilities that I have described.
Remember there is no such thing as a mistake in improvising if you know how to resolve your mistake through relaxing and coming up with a resolve!
Another tip in this area is to remember that a chromatic scale can get you through just about any jack pot. Its a Jazz players best friend.
If you have the option to choose your chord change try and make it one that is begging for a great solo. I never understand why guys like Satch who I am not a big fan of, will solo over the same chord for so many bars without any changes to suggest nice melodies. He does this in
Satch Boogie for example.
We also must not forget the rythm part of a solo, the rythm is as important as the choice of notes and this is something that I have not even touched on in this long post lol. Most guys are learing stuff from tab nowadays and I think this is an injustice to themselves because they are learning stuff that is far to advanced for there level of musicianship and in doing so they seldom get the rythms, feels, accents, vibratos or any other small nuances which make up a great solo!
In conclusion I hope this post has been helpful and I hope that its length is informative and not irritating lol.
With all that I have said, it is still important to remember that theory is another great tool that will assist you in many ways in your endeavors as guitar players, so learn it a little at a time, lets face it, it can be boring but if learned in small doses and then applied to expand your playing it can be fun. Like a parent teaching you how to tie your shoe laces then how to tell time etc. They do not try and teach you all the worlds knowledge before you start living.
You live and you learn, so I think its just as important to play and learn as well. So just like with learning about life, learn parts of theory as it becomes important to you and apply it as you need it.
And never forget that guitarists like Eddie have only touched on a few small areas of music in terms of scales, modes etc. but guys like Eddie took these areas and developed them so well, that they are now legends without learning the endless things that there are to know about music. And a guy like Eddie is far better than alot of virtuosos. He certainly is better than the ones that do not understand the things I am touching on here.
Sometimes knowing to much can prevent a player from having a style. We cannot master every style, we are lucky if we master a few.
I am a session player who has a huge interest in most styles, so I get into anything that I am cabable of playing but I try to play for the song and not let the song be there to play for me and I even apply this to open solos by sticking to things that fit in the frame work of that particular solo. So no matter what it is you are playing you have to show restraint or you will just sound like you are trying to squeese in every trick that you have. If that makes any sense lol.
For example, when I am making a record I try and restrain and contain myself to a certain area in order to have repetition and things that the listener can grab onto. This applies not only to soloing but to all areas of music.
One last thought, if you pay attention to what you are doing, you will learn alot of theory by observation, you will not likely have the same names for things you learn but you will understand the concepts and then later be able to cross reference these discoveries with your theory studies.
When I started off in the studio 15 years or so ago I use to read manuals front to back and alot of it sounded like alkdfkladsfadf lol, then I learned to scan the manual use the gear and then go back and forth.
The same thing applies to the quest of understanding music and ITS EXPLANATION which = theory and lets never forget that in most cases the music came before its explanation!
Thanks and I hope that this tiny piece of my learnings over the years will be of help to you guys and once again I apologize for its length but this was not something that I could cover in one paragraph haha
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Golden Ears
. Just imagine all the stuff you can do when you get into more complex chords. Good luck. I hope this helps and I hope I didnt confuse you. Just think of it as addition. Ex. C maj. + Emin. = C maj7.
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Hybrid Mode
