How To Improvise On Guitar And Make People Feel Deep Emotions When You Play Blues Guitar Solos

By Antony Reynaert

Do you want to learn how to make people really feel what you play? Most guitarists practice improvisation from an experimental approach. They hope that if they keep on with their random improvising, someday they will play great, but this seldomly happens. The reality is that the way in which you’re being trained on the guitar is also the approach that you will use when you improvise.

If there’s no approach to improvisation than the result will also be subject to trail and error. In the next tips you will learn the improvisational methods that master teachers use to turn their students into great guitar players by connecting their emotions to their playing, so that you can start to uncover your true potential when you improvise on guitar.

How To Touch Deep Emotions When You Play Blues Guitar Solos

When playing solos, melodies and lead-guitar parts, it’s important that we convey this with emotion. It’s just as boring to listen to someone with no nuances in his/her voice, as it is to listen to someone play a guitar solo that’s one lick after the other without evoking any emotion. So it’s important to convey a certain feeling in your guitar playing. To learn this we will be looking into a few improvisation exercises.

Know Your Goals When Writing And Improvising Guitar Solos

Whether you want to write or improvise a guitar solo, it’s important that you keep several goals in mind. This is however very personal; what do you want to achieve with your solo? Which feelings do you wish to convey? These questions will help you to form a clearer picture of what it is that you want to express with your guitar solo and thereby make the solo stand out more; give it it’s unique touch.

You could, of course, always write/play from an experimental point of view, but by being more conscious about the decisions you make, you will be able to, deliberately or not, raise the level of your guitar solos exponentially.

Exercises To Become Fully Self-Expressed When Improvising

The typical approach that most guitarists choose is to improvise solos without giving much thought to what it is they want to express with their solo. This is part of the reason why so many guitarists sound the same. The reality is that the way in which you’re being trained on the guitar is also the approach that you will use when you improvise.

If there’s no approach and you play from a trail and error approach, you’ll have far less chances to become fully self-expressed on your instrument. All great improvisers have a series of improvisational goals in mind (whether consciously or subconsciously) and practice in a way to gradually unlock their potential for maximum expressiveness.  

Improvisation Exercise 1: Improvise a guitar solo from an experimental point of view. This is the approach that you probably take all the time when improvising.

Improvisation Exercise 2: Improvise a guitar solo, but try to decide which emotion you want to convey beforehand. Below you will find some examples.

Different emotions for a solo:
-Modest
-Enthusiastic
-Hysterical
-Friendly
-Happy
-Pissed off
-Melancholy
-…

Improvisation Exercise 3: Now improvise a guitar solo, but use a combination of different emotions. To start out let’s use two contrasting emotions such as ‘shy’ and ‘overly confident’.  Start out your solo with emotion one, while you gradually change towards emotion two.

Which of these solos sounded best? The solo where you used an experimental approach or the solos where you consciously thought about the emotions you wanted to express? It takes some time to become good at this, but even at this point you’ll probably find the solos where you became aware of the emotions you wanted to convey the better ones.

Achieve Improvisational Freedom By Becoming Aware Of The Feedback Loop Between Your Emotions And The Sound You Produce

The absolute end goal for most improvisers is to be able to be actively aware of the continuous feedback loop between what you hear and your feelings. In this way the feelings you evoke in your guitar solo continuously evolve as you are playing, because every time you’re playing something you’ll automatically reflect on that feeling and will be able to steer the expressiveness of your next phrases towards a resolution of that feeling.

This is also what most people attract to blues guitar playing; to be able to play what you feel. Sadly, improvisation in general and the guitar specifically is being taught on an experimental level, with the exception of a few master educators. These master teachers will guide their students through specific awareness exercises, tools to uncover self-expressiveness and improvisational methods, such as the exercises described above. These exercises will start to steer you towards uncovering your true potential when you improvise on guitar.

In order to unlock your true expressiveness on the guitar, learn about improving your improvisation with specific practice strategies so that you can express yourself freely on the guitar. In this free guide will learn exactly how to play guitar with feeling.