How To Improvise Awesome Blues Guitar Solos
Have you ever wanted to know what great guitarists thought about when they improvised? It’s a great question to ask, because in the answer lays a big part of the solution to becoming a great lead guitarist yourself. If you know what to focus on you can become a better improviser much quicker then if you are randomly improvising. So let’s take a look at how to improve your improvisation by examining what is going on in the mind of great improvisers and how they were being trained on their instrument.
Most people are attracted to blues guitar simply because they want to play what they feel. They want their guitar to become the instrument that enables them to express what they feel inside. Sadly, improvisation in general and guitar specifically is being thought on an experimental level, with a few master educators being the exception. These master teachers will present more and more application and awareness exercises upon their students to uncover the students their self-expressiveness and improvisational mastery.
In this article we will take a look at one of the exercises that would be used by such master educators to train their students in the process of building highly expressive guitar solos.
The Feedback Loop Between What You Hear And What You Feel
For most improvisers their most aspiring end goal is to be actively aware of the contineous feedback loop between what they hear and what they feel. Let’s take a deeper look at what this means.
Every time you’re improvising something you’ll want to reflect on that feeling and that reflection will determine the expression of your next phrases, because the feelings you evoke when you play a guitar solo continuously evolve as you are playing. In this way the guitar solo is creating itself as you play.
Convey Your Solos With Emotions
But this is only half of the story. In order to become a great improviser on guitar, it’s first important to learn to play with feeling and put emotion in your solos, melodies and even rhythm parts. It’s really boring to listen to someone speak with no nuances in his/her voice and this also applies to guitar playing. If you play a guitar solo where you play one lick after the other without expressing any emotion, it becomes boring to the listener really quickly. To learn to express yourself better in your guitar solos we will look at a few ‘high impact’ improvisation exercises.
Exercises For Self-Expression In Guitar Solos
It’s common for guitarists to play guitar solos without thinking about what they want to express with any given solo. This is why many guitar solos out there sound very similar to one another. The important part to know is that the approach you use when improvising determines the quality of your guitar solo and is directly tied to the way you are being trained on the guitar.
If you didn’t go trought any improvisational training on the guitar you will automatically play using a trail and error approach. By doing this you will greatly diminish your chances of becoming fully self-expressed on the guitar. It’s known that the great improvisers hold several improvisational goals in their mind (whether this happens on a conscious or subconscious level) and set up their practice routine so that they gradually unlock their maximum potential for expressive guitar playing.
- Self-Expression Exercise 1:
Start improvising a guitar solo using the trial and error approach; which simply means you are just experimenting with random notes/scales on the guitar. This is probably the approach you take all of the time when you are improvising.
- Self-Expression Exercise 2:
Now improvise again, but this time decide which emotion that you want to convey before you start playing. Here are some emotions you can use.
Emotions you can use in an improvised guitar solo:
-Humble
-Angry
-Shy
-Depressed
-Ecstatic
-Overly confident
-Relaxed
-…
- Self-Expression Exercise 3:
This time, when improvising use a combination of different emotions from the list above. As a first exercise with combined emotions, use two contrasting emotions such as overly confident and shy. When you start out your guitar solo, use the first emotion and then gradually shift towards the second emotion.
Now which of these solos sounded best to you? The one where you experimented using the trail and error approach or the one where you gave thought to the emotions that you wanted to convey? Of course, it takes some time to get good at using this last approach, but chances are that even at this point you find the solos where you actively thought about what you wanted to express the better solos.
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