I remember growing up, practicing guitar and learning the minor pentatonic scale. It was an exciting time, when I discovered that any of the notes of this scale sounded good if I played them over the right chords. I was hooked for life!

But I wanted more; I wanted to master the guitar totally. I quickly became frustrated and found myself running in circles in the same scale patterns over and over again. It was like my fingers kept on repeating the same old things every time I played a guitar solo.

Years later, I now realize that to become a great guitarist, one should focus on different practice strategies all at the same time, instead of just using one approach. While learning scale patterns is a legitimate first step to take, it is also a step that should be approached with care if you don’t want to waste a lot of time improving your solos using a trail and error approach.

The most important part is not how many licks you have under your belt, but how creative you are with what you know. The more variations on the same licks you can make, the better you are going to get as a guitarist. If you ever want to ‘master’ the guitar, you should remember that mastery isn’t only about how much you know, but it’s even more about what you can do with this information.

Here are three tips to make sure that your fingers stop aimlessly running up and down the guitar fretboard and start to make real music instead.

Come Up With Licks And Alter Them

Take a few notes out of a scale like the minor pentatonic scale.
Once you found a couple of notes that sound good together, try to come up with variations. You can add expression techniques such as slides, hammer-ons and pull-offs, vibrato, etc. to make the lick more interesting.
You can also play the notes in the opposite order, add some extra notes or extract notes, change the pitch of some of the notes, transpose the lick, etc. The possibilities are countless.

The idea here is to come up with as many variations, so that over time you will have the skills to come up with variations of the same lick when you’re soloing.

Make Use Of Repetition In Your Playing!

But wait a minute, will our solo still be interesting if we made countless variations on the same lick? Of course we don’t want to overuse this approach, but most beginners will never repeat the same idea and instead run across the neck of the guitar without going anywhere.

About repetition in music, it is said that amateurs try to get away from it, while professionals look for it. This is exactly true, listen to your favorite blues guitarists and you will find that they use repetition in a lot of different ways.

To start embracing repetition in your soloing, try out the following exercises:

1) Repeat the same lick as many times as you feel like.
Hold this lick even when the underlying chords change, as this gives a very neat effect. In music theory terms this is called a ‘pedal tone melody’. Try it out and you’ll be amazed how good this little trick sounds.

2) Try to repeat the same lick four times, with one alteration of the same lick (where you for instance change some of the notes of the lick) the fourth time you play the lick.

3) transpose your licks to fit the chords of the progression. You can also transpose the same lick to fit all the chords of a progression, simply by playing this lick in the position of the guitarneck that corresponds with the underlying chord. So for instance if you play a lick in the A minor pentatonic scale at the 5th fret (box position), you can transpose the lick to D minor pentatonic in it’s box position at the 10th fret. Note: be carefull when you do this, as some of notes in the lick can clash with the underlying chords.

Learn To Know The Guitar Fretboard Inside Out

Apart from more obvious things like learning the notes on the guitar, you should focus on different activities and exercises that will improve your self-confidence on the guitar fretboard. Here are some practice strategies that will help you achieving this.

1) Sing along to your playing

Sing along the notes you play, you will find yourself playing more beautiful and smoother melodies then usual.

2) Play blindfolded

Playing blindfolded, or in a dark room, will improve your ability to ‘feel’ where to go on the neck of the guitar. When you get the hang of this, combine this strategy with the first one; play blindfolded while singing.

3) Practice your scales on one string

Practicing your guitar scales on one string will help you on many different levels in your progress with the guitar (which I won’t go into here).

Now when you focused on these three fretboard strategies, combine them. Play blindfolded and sing along while you practice your scales on one string.

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