When I write new lessons I kind of interact with them while I’m writing, to get ideas and quite often I get caught up in the moment, ending up spending more time with the guitar in my hands instead of writing the lesson. Nothing wrong with that, it’s what playing guitar is all about but today something got me thinking about where a lot of guitarists go wrong and it reminds me of something that I read on Justin’s guitar site (excellent guitar resource) about transcribing. He’s really passionate about trying to convince you to stop relying on TABs and start listening, work things out for yourself, something which I couldn’t agree more.

If you’ve read more than a few of my lessons then you’ll know by now that I’m very passionate about convincing you to stop looking for quick fixes and realise that the boring stuff (which is only as boring as you make it) is where it’s all at. Why am I reminded of this? Because today while I was working on the new lesson, I sidetracked and ended up playing the minor pentatonic scale on one string with only one finger and I didn’t stop for about an hour doing just that and only that. Now the thing is, and this is really important, I’m not new to doing these kind of exercises, I’ve done similar things a thousand times for thousands of hours, I know them inside out but I’m never going to stop benefiting from them. Not ever! What’s more, even after this amount of years I’m still not bored with any of it and I still gain experience every time I do it.

This is what it takes to play guitar. You are never too good to practice stuff that on the surface seems so simple that you can skip to something more difficult or exciting. Many of my readers are guitarists that are stuck in the rut. If this is you then please take notice of what I have said here. It’s probably the most important piece of advice that will get you out of the guitar rut. What do I have to do to convince you?

Cliché No1
Theory stifles creativity!

Cliché No2
Hendrix and the great blues players didn’t need theory!

Cliché No3
Who wants to stick to rules, theory is for geeks

To be honest, I think statements like these are the most ridiculous and uneducated responses to this debate I have ever heard. The argument is a pointless one from both sides because the real answer has nothing to do with the need to be strictly educated or non educated in theory. The real question is do you need to know theory and if so how much do you need to know. All of this depends purely on your chosen style of music and your goals as a musician. Generally speaking you could probably assume the following.

• Play camp fire style guitar – No theory required
• 12 bar blues guitarist – You could go quite far without theory
• Advanced blues guitarist – It starts getting harder without but still possible
• Rock guitarist – Yes and no, depends how far you want to go
• Advanced rock improviser – Very few will get by without good theory knowledge
• Jazz guitarist – Few will get by without good theory knowledge
• Classical composer – Theory is an absolute must

The above list I would argue is fairly accurate, but as I said, generally speaking. There will always be musicians in either camp that will argue with it but the fact is, you can only generalise because even though it will be true for the majority of guitarists, it has been proven many times there will always be somebody that comes along and shows that great musicianship can be achieved for every genre at every level with no music theory knowledge. The important thing to remember here is that these kind of people are in the minority and as the music becomes more challenging the prodigies become less common.

When it comes to the less demanding styles the amount of theory required is actually not that much and is surprisingly easy to learn. Basic knowledge can go a very long way and even if you firmly believe you can get by without it you would be forcing yourself to miss out on a huge amount of learning resources because if you don’t fully understand something then you are unlikely to find ways to apply it. Playing with ideas is one of the best ways to increase your own ability to create fresh ideas. At it’s simplest level theory is a means of musical communication if nothing else.

Never forget that no two people are the same. Just because one person might be able to get to a great level without theory knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean you can do the same. The most important thing to understand about theory is the music came first, it is nothing more than an explanation of what musicians have done over the course of many years. Is it wise to ignore all this information and then go figuring it out all over again on your own. Refusing to learn basic theory is doing just that because you can avoid it all you like but even with no knowledge of it at all you will still end up “sticking to the rules” whether you realise it or not.

There are some people that absolutely amaze me with their ability to sing and play guitar at the same time, complicated rhythms and difficult parts with absolute ease and perfection. It’s something I have always envied and put down to natural talent. If however you have read my article about natural talent then you know that I think this “gift” is more about luck than talent and in most cases everybody has the same chance of reaching those levels of musicianship, or at the very least, improve greatly.

Generally speaking, everybody has the same basic physical make up. We do however all have individual character and our own way of interpreting everything we learn in life. This by it’s very nature allows some people to adapt, or be more naturally suited to certain things than others. What makes a great guitarist doesn’t necessarily make a great drummer etc. You may go through your entire life never finding out that you was indeed the perfect candidate for becoming a drummer with ‘natural talent’ or a pianist, an athlete, writer or whatever. Because you never spend any time, or have interest in many of these things, you will never end up finding out.

The good thing is it has been proved many times that most people can be trained to a professional level in almost any subject. The only difference between you and the naturally talented person is what they do by way of their natural character. All you might need is a method to train yourself to do the same thing.

There seems to be a complete lack of study and lesson material available for teaching the art of singing and playing guitar (or any musical instrument) at the same time. In fact, I have never managed to find anything useful on the subject so what I intend to do here is put forward my own thoughts about it and give you some ideas to create exercises that will improve your ability to play guitar and sing at the same time.

Most of what we do naturally I think is a result of what gets fed to our minds regularly, not just music but everything from physical abilities to personal opinions. I doubt that you’ll find anybody that would think driving a car or even walking is a product of natural talent yet both require practice to do well. Walking is a very complicated process if you break it down and study it in detail, but none of us give it any thought, we learn as a child and never think about it again.

If you have kids then you are probably more fascinated by this then anyone else, watching your child learn to walk is an amazing experience. Once they can do it, they then put it to practice everyday almost constantly without conscious thought yet it still takes a long while before you could call them a truly confident walker. There are obviously other factors that complicates this even further because the child is still growing, hasn’t gained enough strength etc but the point is that no matter what you do or learn in life it still has to be mastered by practice.

So how do I learn to sing and play my guitar at the same time?

Unfortunately I have no definite answer to this question. What I do have though is a lot of confidence that everybody can improve by a huge amount in a reasonably short period of time.

The first thing you will need to do is forget about those musicians that seem to have a natural ability to sing and play effortlessly and instead take a look at the professionally trained musician. Have you ever noticed that the professionally trained musicians all seem to be able to talk flawlessly while they are playing and explaining something at the same time. You see this often in teaching videos. Talking in a naturally flowing voice is just as hard as singing at the same time.

Q. What is one of the biggest differences between the way an amateur and the professional practices their instrument?
A. The professionals learn to walk before they can run.

Having the ability to sing and play at the same time has a lot to do with the basic mastering of various rhythms against the main beat. This is something that all professional musicians spend a lot of time practicing. Very few amateurs do this, especially the self taught.

A perfect example of this might be tapping your foot. Virtually every book on music will tell you to tap quarter notes with your foot in time with what you practice. I’m willing to bet that everyone who has trouble singing and playing guitar simultaneously cannot tap their foot perfectly in quarter notes over a difficult syncopated patterns, with or without singing. Most amateurs, even if they do tap their foot, can only do it well over straight rhythms that are spread evenly.

This might not be the answer to being able to sing and play anything over any rhythm but I’m certain that if you have trouble doing this then you will have just as much trouble singing and playing at the same time. Try this experiment, find a rhythm that you can’t keep a straight quarter note going with your foot without messing up. Now try the same thing but instead of using your foot count one two three four. You’ll probably find that what you can’t do with your foot, you also can’t can’t count with your voice. If this proves anything at all it tells us that we are trying to walk before we can run.

I started learning to play drums not so long ago and unlike when I first took up guitar, I started out by doing everything the recommended way, just doing rhythm exercises. I have no plans to rush on the drums or run before I can walk like I did with the guitar.

When I first started learning guitar, I skipped all of the recommended exercises because I thought they were boring and unhelpful to me, and in all honesty, they just looked too simple. One of the most important things I have learnt since then (because of my drum practice) is these simple boring exercises help you in every way. Lets say for instance I want to learn (as a beginner) drum pattern W, X, Y and Z because they sound cool. Because I’m impatient, I skip patterns A through V because they are just boring exercises and go straight into learning some cool beats starting with pattern W. It’s difficult at first but I manage it. After this I spend a few months on pattern X and do the same thing through to Z until I can play reasonably well all four patterns.

I still can’t play patterns A to V nor can I play A1 to Z1 or anything else. What I have done here is skipped the most important elements to timing, rhythm and plain natural ‘feel’. Had I learnt the building blocks first then I would have gone through patterns W to Z with ease and then moved on to the next level ready and armed with all the basic requirements for mastering the more difficult things. Everything I do from now on becomes easier to learn, not necessarily easy to play, but certainly be prepared and ready in every respect necessary to progress properly.

So how does this relate to singing and playing the guitar at the same time?. I believe the simple and basic building blocks that are part of all professional level training programs is where the problem lies for the rest of us… we don’t learn them!

When I first started singing and playing in a band there were a lot of songs I couldn’t sing while playing, although after many years of doing it I certainly improved. Still I have to be somewhat choosy over my choice of song. The ones that give me most trouble are those that have non symmetrical syncopated rhythms.

One thing I have learned from playing a lot with a metronome over the years, and even more so with drumming, is there’s a big difference between playing a rhythm in time and actually ‘feeling’ time. I can think of no way of explaining this but maybe you have experienced it yourself. It is that point you reach when you are playing to a click and all of a sudden everything locks into one unit, the click suddenly stops serving as a guide for time keeping but becomes the pulse, the drive, heartbeat or whatever you want to call it and you can feel it pushing and pulling your rhythm like the two are locked together.

This is the “feel” I believe we need to achieve in singing and playing. The singing should not be locking onto the rhythm or vice versa but both the guitar and the singing need to be locking independently onto the feel of straight time, the actual pulse of the beat. There are many exercises you can do to help with this and they don’t necessarily have to include singing, in fact I think the singing practice should not even be started until you can at least count in time with a lot of these syncopated rhythms.

Over the course of time I will post up a few exercise ideas. I can’t guarantee they will make you a master at singing and playing at the same time but I can guarantee if you do them properly, you will improve this ability by a huge amount.

There’s an abundance of guitar TABS in books and scattered throughout the internet for transcribed guitar solos and they can be a great source for learning new ideas or just purely for learning a song but many guitarists actually learn very little from them. To an extent it’s arguable that they are slowing down your progress as a lead guitarist.

This does of course depend on what your goals are and what you are trying to achieve from them, if all you want to do is learn a song purely for the enjoyment of playing it or if you are learning a composed piece of music that is supposed to be played exactly as written then this might not relate to you but there is no doubt the most common use for guitar TABS is to learn either the chords to a song or a guitar solo.

Using TABS to learn chords for a song is okay if you are in a hurry or have tried to figure them out yourself and failed, but if you rely on this method too often then you are doing nothing to help yourself become a better guitarist. Most popular rock and blues songs should give you little difficulty trying to figure out chords by listening to the record. It really is quite easy and very few should give you any problem. All it takes is a reasonably well trained ear (not necessarily a great one) and the only way you get better at this is by keep trying. It gets easier once you start realising many songs use common chord progressions and the more often you do it the quicker you will get it.

Let’s presume I have been playing lead guitar for a while using the usual pentatonic scales and ideas but all of my solos are predictable and lack excitement. I aspire to become as good as my guitar hero Garry Moore and so I find every TAB I can get for all of his solos and then spend the next six months learning them all note for note. So what new ideas might I have actually learnt by doing this and what have I learnt about Moore’s style of playing?. Well, if I’m anything like many amateur lead guitar players then I have probably learnt nothing, other than adding a few songs to my repertoire.

If my goal is to improve as a lead guitarist then I need to find and practice as many ideas as I can find or think of myself. If I use a TAB to learn a Gary Moore solo note for note then I will most likely be achieving nothing towards this goal, notes are just notes, I have twelve to choose from and they are already in front of me ready to do what I like with them. One of my biggest problems is I just don’t know what to do with them other than running up and down pentatonic scales. So how should I go about improving and learning things that help me in this area.

Here is where TABS can be really useful because playing lead guitar and improvising solos is all about having ideas and one of the best ways to really get comfortable with an idea is experiment with it outside of it’s original source. This could mean playing a part of it over a different chord or another key for instance and by doing so you will not only be improving your skills, you will also be extending your ideas and getting closer to understanding the methods used by your guitar hero. If you don’t experiment in this way then you are more likely investing all of your valuable time learning something that can’t be of any use to you outside of the particular song you learnt it from.

Something else to take into consideration is my guitar hero himself has probably played this solo completely on the fly (other than the obvious hooks and phrases) or maybe built up some ideas after playing along a few times himself to get a kind of foundation for the solo. Many of the notes he played were just notes that happened for no other reason than “they just did” and depending on the actual take that got used in the mixing session it may have just as easily turned out to be a very different solo in the final track that made it to the album.

With this in mind you should hopefully realise that learning to become a good lead guitarist is a lot more involved than learning someone else’s random note choices. What we are looking for to improve is ideas that we can re-use and manipulate for use in different chord progressions, not ideas that have no use outside of the place you learnt them. The bottom line is it’s possible you might learn from just one TAB much much more than you might learn from a hundred purely in the way that you make use of it.
So how do you go about pulling this kind of information out of a TAB?. Depending on your experience this could be a very lengthy topic so instead I’ll just give you a few ideas.

Experimenting with TABS

Firstly, experience comes from playing with many many ideas and you should not limit yourself to TABS of just one particular guitarist, secondly don’t waste your time learning every single note for a solo unless you really have a desire to play it exactly as it was recorded. If you do this then bear in mind as mentioned above, this solo could have turned out very different than the one you eventually got to hear on the record, also when this guitarist plays live it is very likely his solo will be very different every time he plays it so think about what are you really achieving. If you are planning to play this song live then what will you do if the rest of the band happens to cock up the backing during your solo or you suddenly have a mind blank, how will you get out of a situation like this.

Obviously a hook is a hook, it is a melodic line that is intended to be played as it was written so there isn’t much room for improvisation on something like this and to be honest it is not something that really has anything to do with this article, what we are looking for is ideas that we can put into our trick bag and pull them out whenever inspiration tells us to. This will often involve manipulating them on the fly.
When you look at a TAB concentrate only on the parts that interest you and try to work out if anything is obvious. Is it just a lick, is it a scale run, a scale sequence, just noodling, an arpeggio, is it the rhythmic elements that make it sound great, does a certain lick only sound right over a certain chord? etc..

Find a backing track for the song you are working on or better still make your own and try to put some of these ideas in different places, chop some of them in halve and mix them with others, try them out over the backing track. What scale will also work over this backing track, will one scale alone work or does it sound like it needs to change scales in certain places. If so go back and analyse the TAB and see if you can work out where the scales change and why.

Make a new backing track using the same chords but this time try them in a different order, now apply what you have learnt so far and see if you can make it still fit and sound good.
Make another backing track but this time alter the tempo and the rhythm as much as you can, give it a completely different feel. Now try to use these same ideas create a solo, you should find this the hardest to do, you might find the licks or scale runs you’ve so far learnt might no longer fit or need to be made shorter with less notes or vice versa.
Make a backing track that sounds nothing like the original and only use one or two chords from it, find some different chords to add, see if you can make any of these ideas still work over this backing track.

The above is just an outline of various ideas, the possibilities are almost endless. If you don’t understand something then don’t worry about it but don’t to let that stop you playing around with it anyway. I know this sounds stupid but we usually learn more about something purely by not understanding it in the first place because we are forced to do a little thinking. If you spend some time analysing something and feel like you aren’t getting anywhere then don’t brush it off as a waste of time, the brain has a strange way of working like this and you have probably progressed somewhat without realising.

Those Eureka moments don’t just suddenly happen, for instance you may look at something (not necessarily music related) and don’t understand it, you do the same another day and still don’t understand it, you think about it in bed when you can’t sleep and still don’t understand it. This goes on for a while and suddenly one day Eureka! it all makes sense. These moments don’t come out of the blue, nothing has changed all of a sudden, all that happened is over the course of time you was learning something and building your understanding even if it was only going on subconsciously.

With that said, don’t spend too long analysing something you don’t understand because it might not even need to make any sense, all that’s required is for you to use as many ideas in as many variations as you can think of. Experience will do the rest all on it’s own, if you waste [I]too[/I] much time getting nowhere then you are slowing down your progress.

When you play with an idea don’t worry how bad it sounds, this is in your own time and only you need to hear it, if it sounds terrible then consider that a great thing because if nothing ever sounded bad then there would be no need to learn how to make it sound good, trying to make something bad sound good is a perfect way to learn and improve, consider this your greatest source of education because only when something sounds bad will you be forced to think and experiment, don’t worry about music theory at this stage, if you can use theory to figure out why something sounds bad then great but if you cant then it does not matter. This will still result in progress even if you can’t describe why right now.

If you think hard enough about it you might come to the conclusion that natural talent would be more accurately described as just natural luck. I’m a five foot ten weed and weigh around ten stone, if it was my dream to become a world class heavyweight wrestler then it’s a pretty safe assumption to say it will never happen, I simply don’t have the weight or the strength and very likely never could have. If I wanted to be a contortionist performing in a circus it’s just as unlikely I would ever get the job. Very few people will consider a wrestler or contortionist to do what they do because of natural talent, sure they both need to train to become good at it and we accept that without question.

Before I carry on with this, note I am not saying there aren’t some people that seem to have that “magical” element and they excel at amazingly fast rates to an amazing level. These people do exist without doubt but they are among the few, not the many.

So let’s forget about the amazing minority and concentrate on the rest of us and our quest to reach good levels of musicianship. I’ll divide them up into six categories.

• Absolutely gifted, very few people ever reach this level
• Virtuoso
• Highly professional
• Professional
• Amateur
• Novice

The playing ability of each category isn’t important, these are hypothetical just to make a point but lets say Virtuoso is just about as good as you could expect to get, gifted goes a notch above virtuoso that very few people can ever reach, highly professional is what most would consider as good as you ever need to be, professional is very good and competent, amateur is all round reasonable and novice has gained enough experience to play in a simple band. These are levels I have made up and are purely fictional so don’t use this as a way to grade yourself!

There’s a great deal of guitarists that have been playing for many years and never manage to go much beyond novice, or maybe just about reach amateur level. Some will remain happy at this level but many will get disheartened by younger and less experienced guitarists overtaking them in relatively short periods of time, putting it down to natural talent. It’s easy to get disheartened if you have put in many years of hard work and practice to then watch somebody overtake you in no time at all. Believing this is because you don’t have the natural talent seems the obvious reason. The fact is however, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Unlike the wrestler or the contortionist that require certain physical builds such as height, weight, above average strength or double jointedness (is that a word!), the professional guitarist comes in all shapes, sizes and disabilities. There are professional musicians that are small, tall, fat, thin,weak, strong, big hands, small hands, thin fingers, fat fingers, some are blind and some have only one arm and/or missing fingers. I could go on but you get the point!

The thing here is most people have the physical abilities required to get to a professional and maybe even virtuoso level and this includes those that have played for years and never got much further than novice.
Natural talent shouldn’t really be discarded as a myth but certainly should be looked into more deeply than just shrugging it off as an excuse. I’m not going to argue that natural talent does not exist but I will argue that if it does then it is definitely not a requirement for reaching most of the levels described above, it is probably a requirement for reaching the gifted level and I have no opinion on virtuoso but I do believe that anyone with the right dedication could probably reach virtuoso.

To make this whole subject less arguable let’s consider the professional level, one that most novices and amateurs would be quite happy to reach. The fact they have already reached novice shows that they already possess most of the abilities required to reach a professional level and probably the only things missing are belief and desire. I would argue that the following list amounts to virtually every requirement needed to reach a professional level.

• Arms (not necessarily both)
• Fingers (not necessarily all of them)
• Muscles
• Good reflexes
• Brain
• Belief
• Desire / dedication
• Knowing the difference between constructive practice and repetition
• Time to gain experience

As arrogant as that list might sound sound, it really is the basic requirements and most people possess them all. Obviously the person with disabilities will have a harder time and maybe require more belief than the rest but they do not let that stop them because of desire.

So what is it that makes a great guitar player?. Three obvious things are..

1. Actual music skills and knowledge gained by theory and experience (The music theory vs non theory debate is irrelevant here). You don’t need to have super intelligence, pretty much everybody has this ability, if anything is lacking here it would be not having enough real interest and maybe a lack of understanding the real difference between experience and just plain repetition.

2. A good ear. This is one of those things that’s not quite fully understood and a lot of people will believe they don’t have this ability. Understanding the requirements of a good ear needs to have it’s own subject but for now just accept this doesn’t mean perfect pitch (although that would be nice) and everybody has the ability to train their ear, in fact if you have been playing guitar for a while then it’s quite likely you have already trained your ear to an extent without even realising it. If you have ever heard yourself or other musicians accidentally play a wrong note then you already have basic listening skills, otherwise you wouldn’t have known it was a wrong note!

3. Technique. This is the big one because it’s the one that most believe you can only reach high levels with by natural talent. The two main things that the novice might struggle with are finger flexibility and speed. It’s unfortunate that speed is always used as a reference to judge a musicians ability but that’s the way it is so speed is what I might as well talk about here, although in this case, it probably does make quite a good example as finger flexibility is very much related.

Two points to consider.. it’s very important to believe that speed as well as the flexibility to finger various chord shapes rely on muscle memory and can only be gained accurately by repetition and slow practice. Practice does not make perfect unless it’s perfect practice and perfection can only be gained at slow speeds, this is a fact.

The second point goes a bit deeper and is about posture and relaxation. Most guitarists that spend a long time playing guitar and still have trouble playing anything fast or still can’t manage to finger certain chord shapes without difficulty are not lacking natural talent but are restricting themselves in one way or another by being too stiff or simply holding the guitar wrong. It’s very important at this stage to discard all cliché responses like “yeah well Hendrix had his thumb over the neck”, “Angelo anchors his pinkie”, “Doc Watson picks from the elbow”, “his wrist is always bent” etc etc.. It is all completely and utterly irrelevant. This is the most important thing that you need to start beleiving in.. “EVERYBODY IS DIFFERENT”.

If you cannot do something then you have either peaked your level or in some way or another you are practicing incorrectly and allowing your body position, shape, tension, posture, hand placement or whatever to cause you restrictions. Unless you are already among the professional levels then it is EXTREMELY UNLIKELY that you have peaked your physical abilities.

One thing worth noticing with the novice who believes he possesses no natural talent is to observe how he holds and plays the guitar? It’s very unlikely to be anything resembling any of the recommended methods which often look “uncool” and are avoided or just simply not taken notice of. Again forget the arguments, there are many guitarists that contradict all the recommendations but you are not other guitarists, you are you, and if you are having trouble with something then you need to figure out what it is and find ways to correct it.

Speed and flexibility relies on many different things within the body to all work efficiently together in perfect synchronisation controlled by the brain and every one of them needs to be as relaxed as possible in order to not create restrictions that work against you. Everybody’s biological make up will have differences, different shapes and sized muscles, finger lengths. joint locations, thought processes etc.

The person that is considered to have a natural talent in most cases has nothing more than pure luck that the requirements to play the guitar efficiently have fallen perfectly in line with the way he controls, relaxes and positions his body naturally. Everybody else has to work out what is holding them back to put them in the same place as the person who has “natural talent”. The recommended methods of holding and position yourself around the guitar is an all round method that should put most people into a less restrictive position so even if you don’t end up playing this way eventually it is certainly a place you should start from at the very least, this will put you a step closer to efficient playing.

Learning to play fast without training yourself first to make all the necessary hand and finger movements slowly and perfectly is the equivalent of a child learning how to write from day one at full writing speed only. Trying to learn something like this at too fast a pace is a guaranteed way to either make your progress even slower, or at worse, totally unachievable. Progress relies on muscle memory which in turn relies on perfection. If you want a more in depth explanation then read this Wikipedia article on Muscle memory

Only once you have muscle movement and hand synchronisation perfected will you have the headroom to move onto a greater speed, in other words if you can play something with perfection at your top speed of 80 bpm then pushing yourself to a perfected 85bpm shouldn’t be very difficult.

There is however a crossover point, as the speed increases it becomes harder to play perfect because things that have no real world effect on efficiency at slower speeds start to become a problem as the speed increases. The biggest reason you find that some people can achieve high speeds in a seemingly short amount of time while others seem to plateau at a much lower speed is because somewhere along the line something is restricting efficiency.

To reach high speeds you need a good technique that can only be obtained either by pure luck that you naturally do everything in an efficient way or by figuring out where the problem areas are. Problem areas cannot be pinpointed at high speeds for obvious reasons.

Two main problem areas that restrict high speeds are tension and excessive or unnecessary movements in the hands and fingers. Other problems such as holding the pick too loose, a pick that’s too thin, incorrect hand/arm/wrist positioning, holding the guitar wrong and poor synchronisation between the left and right hands are all common problems that will all prevent you from reaching high speeds.

You may be suffering from any of the above problems (among others that you might not be aware of) and these need to be tracked down and worked on. Narrowing down these problems can only be done by analysing your technique and working on them at slow speeds. If you continuously practice at speeds higher than you can play with perfection, not only will you never find the problems that need correcting but you will also be embedding this bad technique into your muscle memory.

The speed building exercises in the guitar lessons area will show you how to look out for, and correct these problems. If you really want to play the guitar fast and accurate then you will need to work through many exercises and not expect big results overnight. Like everything else in music, this takes time.

Practice doesn’t always make perfect, only proper practice does. It is entirely possible to play something everyday for ten years and still not get any better at it. Correct practice involves finding problems and ironing them out, this is the only time you can improve on something. Repetition alone will never make you any better at something unless you attempt to repeat it perfectly. I am the perfect proof of this because I spent many years not improving yet I practised for hours every day.

I must admit I’m not a speed freak, even though I quite like a lot of the shred scene it’s not a style I have any big intentions of playing, I am more into rock and groove oriented music and can play at speeds that I am happy with for my style, however I do like a challenge and I do try to fit in some speed training when I have the time. I used to think that playing fast guitar was something I will never achieve because I am just not made for it and don’t have the natural talent. A long while ago I was really into flat picking bluegrass and I spent hours everyday for about two years practising loads of flat picking songs, exercises and scale sequences. In those two years I increased my speed by around 10bpm and could not get any faster.

I still don’t practice very often for speed but years later after I was taught the correct way to practice, I probably spent about half an hour to an hour a day for a few months doing the correct exercises paying very focused attention to my problem areas and working with them. In less than six months I had increased my speed by about 60bpm. Don’t get too excited with that result though, the exercises were different from what I was doing with bluegrass. Had I been doing those same focused exercises back then, it would have equated to about a 20bpm increase. That is still an impressive difference though, 10bpm increase in two years compared to 20bpm in less than six months. I still don’t do speed exercises very often but one thing is for certain, I have gone from thinking I could never do it to now knowing I absolutely can if I want to put the effort in.

Let’s start with a few things to think about, things that you don’t hear about so often in books and other lessons… What does the ear expect to hear! This is quite important. Why? Because when you add this to part of the equation of improvising, you can start narrowing things down quite a lot. For instance, take a straight twelve bar blues shuffle and there will be only so much that the ear would naturally expect to hear. In most cases for most people, this expectation would also be all they really wanted to hear. If you solo the twelve bar blues shuffle with Bebop licks and ideas then you’ll have a hard time finding an appreciative blues audience. Why is this important? Because if you look at all the improvising possibilities as a whole then you’re in for a very long term learning process. This can be a problem with guitar educational books, they often tend to get either too wide or too narrow with the details leaving you wondering what it is you should be focusing on.

There really is, in my opinion, no point in talking about things like modes or spending any time explaining flat seventh augmented ninths in a book that also includes words like “beginner”, “bluegrass” or “here is the pentatonic box shape”. Neither modes nor extended altered chords really have a place for that style or for that level of experience. Does this mean that if you are a beginner guitarist or a bluegrass fan then you will never use an altered chord? No of course not, but in depth knowledge about it is going to hinder rather than help you if you are a beginner, and if you are strictly a bluegrass player using those kind of things then it’s probably because you found it by accident or picked up the idea somewhere else and liked the sound of it. In depth knowledge of those things won’t have any real value towards understanding you’re preferred genre if it bears little relation to it.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you will never need to learn them, you may, you may not, it really depends where your journey is going to take you, the main point here is that when you get into the real complicated stuff it’s usually when you are ready for it and when that day comes you’ll find you are already way past the stage of understanding the basics, from this point it’s all about building experience and finding the sound you like.

Another example of what the ear expects… You witness the same old statements on forums and quite often when having discussions with other musicians, “he can shred like crazy but his blues sucks”, “A great jazzer but can’t play rock to save his life” etc.. These kind of statements can often be quite valid but are usually just misguided. If you get a group of the best jazzers and shredders and give them a BB king backing track to jam with then there’s pretty much no doubt a lot of them of them will play something that the ardent blues fan will think is rubbish. The reality is it’s nothing to do with them having no “soul” or “can only play fast runs,” it’s everything to do with those guitarists knowing little about that genre, they rarely listen to it, possibly hate it and have likely spent little to no time ever practicing it. Most of them could play a mean blues but few of them can play what you would expect to hear as a devoted, hardcore blues fan. Therefore listening to, imitating and learning as much as you can about your preferred style is where most of your practice and learning time should be spent. I’m a huge fan of understanding basic music theory but it’s important to be realistic. If you only want to play like the old time bluesers then do what they do, learn by listening, learn a bundle of licks, jam and learn from others. Theory won’t hurt, but it also might not matter.

Again, why is all this important? Because if you try too hard to understand too much about too wide a variety of styles in any short period of time then expect it to take longer to master your skill than if you wanted to become a brain surgeon. This is why I admire the likes of Guthrie Govan so much, he’s an amazing guitarist, put him with shredders, jazzers, blues, country or just about any style and he would be able to please most hardcore crowds. That is an amazing achievement. Most of us will never likely do that so you should make your goals realistic, at least in the beginning. Have large goals by all means but don’t let it dominate your practice time and learning experience, as time goes on, if you are ever going to get to those sort of levels then it will happen naturally and will probably only happen if you have a real desire to listen to all those different styles often enough.

The nitty gritty

So let’s start breaking things down and think about the music that relates to this website, rock and blues in the broadest sense. Both often end up a mixture of many styles but they are still based on their own fundamental ideas. In the beginning to intermediate stage of learning to improvise you should really focus mostly on those fundamentals, whatever it is that’s important to the specific styles you like. As you progress, the other ideas will work their way into your style. Don’t presume that you will need to study jazz in depth if your goal is to play blues with a “jazzy feel”. In cases like this try to figure out what it is you really like, jazz with a hint of blues or vice versa. If you find yourself not liking a lot of hardcore jazz music then you’re into blues, not jazz, and if this is the case then just study blues, jazzy ideas will eventually creep in. In other words you might not need to study any jazz to get the sound you are looking for, it will just happen as you seek out new ideas and learn new licks as you try to mimic your favourite players.

I’m pretty sure we all agree there are some great guitarists that have a great ear but don’t know any theory and don’t know all the notes on the fretboard etc.. Let’s, for the sake of this lesson just forget all about that and look at what the average guitarist (most guitarists) needs to know in order to become an advanced, all round confident blues or rock improviser.

A good ear

A good ear is a must, you can train to improve it but to be honest, play enough and it will happen all on it’s own. Training for it is not a bad thing by any means but unless you have a real desire to do a lot of aural exercises then I think it’s something the average blues / rock player doesn’t really need to worry much about, or at least not in the beginner stages.

Technique and timing

A good technique is a must but there’s no mystery involved, everyone knows it just takes a lot of practice. What’s a bigger problem here is that a lot of amateurs really think their technique is better than it actually is. It’s very easy to think something sounds great while you are playing but… record it and listen back, you might be surprised. Timing is also a very overlooked factor, some musicians timing is quite poor and they don’t realise it. Again, recording it often shows this but it’s also a lack of understanding basic timing and rhythms that lets a lot of amateurs down.

Common chords and progressions

For most rock and blues it’s enough to just know the common three and four note chords plus maybe a few five note chords. This means major, minor, major seventh, minor seventh, dominant sevenths and ninths, Sus 4 and Sus 2 (same thing but I’ll leave that for another lesson). It’s important to know how to find these chords in various places on the neck.
Being able to recognise common progressions quickly is also a must. Most Blues and many rock / pop songs often stick around common progressions. A lot of beginners may recognise some of these in just a few keys. Learning to recognise them in all keys is important.

Fretboard Notes

Knowing all the notes on the fretboard is a must simply because it ties everything together.

Chord tones and arpeggios

Arpeggios are basically scales consisting only of chord tones so the two are kind of the same thing. Either way, knowing the chord tones across the neck is probably one of the most important things every guitarist should know. Chord tones are a very important part of improvising and creating solos.

Scales

Knowing scales is obviously important. There are many types of scales worth learning but the major, natural minor, pentatonics and the blues scale are the most important ones for rock and blues.

Licks

It’s important to learn a lot of licks and understand their placement over a particular chord or just a certain style of music and relate them to scales or chord tones where possible. With experience you will find yourself manipulating these licks on the fly.

Recognising the key

This one takes a fair amount of experience to do quickly but it’s important that you understand when a piece of music is in a particular key, if it changes key or temporarily steps out of key, and what your options are when this happens. There is a lot to learn with this one and it takes experience as well as knowledge but the good news is there are some tricks you can use when in a tight spot and you need to make quick decisions. A straight key change is easier to deal with but when faced with temporary key shifts it’s common to just use your ear or rely on chord tones. An important thing to realise with key changes is to know the fretboard and chord tones so well that you can lead into the change smoothly in the smallest step possible. As talked about above “what the ear expects” there is also what the ear generally likes. For most people a smooth change that lands on a chord tone is far more pleasant to the ear and it makes it just sound like you know what you are doing.

Rhythm, space and accents

Possibly the beginner guitarists biggest let down. Music is about rhythm and pitch movement. Unfortunately a lot of beginner solos consist of not much more than sequential, repetitive note movement with no space and no dynamics, I.e. Just running back and forth through scale notes in stepped order with little attention to rhythm and space. It’s easier to forgive a lack of knowledge on note choice because it’s a daunting subject to begin with but paying some attention to the rhythmic value of a guitar solo is something that can improve an amateurs lead playing massively in a short amount of time. This will be discussed in more detail elsewhere on this site.

The bottom line

Experience enough of the above and eventually you will piece all of those things together into one multi-level way of thinking and playing the guitar, sooner or later, a lot of it will start happening on autopilot as long as you are taking it all in as you go. It’s very important that you learn to recognise the difference between repetition and actual learning because this is what often holds things up and stops a lot of guitarists moving forward. For instance, you learn a new lick… now what can you do with it? It’s common for amateurs to do nothing more than learn the lick and have no further use for it outside of the example they got it from. Licks are great block builders to base new ideas around, a lot of the time they are wasted because the guitarist can’t do anything else with them. Simple answer, experiment. Try them in different keys, different styles, different timings, if they are minor licks then try converting them to major, split them in half, speed them up, mix them with others. The possibilities are endless but obviously you need to be able to associate the lick with a scale, chord, arpeggio or any thing that helps you make that association before you can do anything with it in the first place. If you view a lick as just a bunch of notes somewhere on the fretboard then that’s all it will ever be.

Other than playing a blues scale over a twelve bar blues, the entire subject of improvising seems to have no consistent or solid foundation for you to build your knowledge and experience from. If you read enough books you might come to the conclusion that you can play any scale and any note you like over a common three chord progression. Although that is almost true, it’s not how it should be interpreted.

Improvising is all about options and the choices you make are dependant upon what you know and how you have built your experience. For a lot of rock and blues guitarists the options they choose might not be based on a thorough understanding of music theory. You’re guitar idol might be able to play a mean rock and blues solo but give him a complicated jazz chord progression and his options become severely limited if no time has been spent studying jazz or music theory. It don’t mean he won’t have a go though, if his experience has given him a good ear and he can find chord tones quite quickly then a good solo can still happen. It might however sound great to the average rock listener but maybe not to the hardcore jazz fan. If there is one trick that can get you out of a sticky situation it is chord tones and arpeggios. If you can play your way around the fretboard using chord tones as quick as you can find the common chords then you’re always going to be able to play something that, at the very least, fits the music. If you combine this with a well trained ear and a fair bit of experience with arpeggios then the ability to improvise on the fly over various chord progressions starts to become a lot easier.

The sub title of this article was something like “how do I know what to play over what chord” and I still haven’t answered the question, why? Because it’s just not that simple. There’s no one paragraph or simple explanation that can possibly answer the question. I don’t want to just end with “practice” or “experience” even though they are correct answers. The practice sessions on this site have only just got started but they are designed to build your knowledge in steps while working towards the goals of what we have been talking about here. The following summarises some of the things you need to learn to get you on your way to becoming a confident improviser.

• Technique. There’s no mystery surrounding technique but it’s important that you practice it and do not over rate your own ability. It’s very common to NOT be as good as you think you are!
• Learn the fretboard notes
• Learn how to find chord tones
• Use chord tones to make your solo’s sound professional and reflect the chord changes
• Learn to end your phrases on good tones
• Know how to find the song’s key and easily spot if it moves out of key
• Learn to spot the difference between a key change and a temporary key shift
• Know when to use different scale choices
• Using different scale techniques to sound like a pro and not an amateur, i.e. avoiding predictable sequential stepping back and forth through scale patterns

The practice sessions have only just started but this is what you should expect to learn from them as they progress.
All the answers to this article will lie in those sessions. If you have any specific questions that you want answered right now then ask away!

There are many subjects in life that seem to have very little information available to them and sometimes end up being viewed as black art. Improvising on the guitar is no exception. The problem lies somewhere between it being largely a self taught instrument (at least it is for rock and roll) and the attitude that generally attaches itself to most wannabe rock and rollers. By this I don’t mean a bad attitude, not by any means, but a general personality type that considers the maths and the theory to be boring and unnecessary. Not a surprising attitude to have when you consider how many rock ‘n’ rollers don’t know anything about music theory and have proved many times that great music can still be created without it.

If you want to be a lead guitarist then there’s no doubt you need to learn some guitar improvising skills. This often becomes a subject that many find very confusing. Before I go any further let’s be clear about something, improvising skills cannot be learnt quickly and the learning curve often seems to follow no logic. Even though basic rules can be applied, improvising is often no more than a collection of ideas strung together and played over a piece of music. These ideas vary between different styles of music. Ideas have no limits and how many you have depends on how much effort you put into it, the hard part is knowing when, where and how to apply them.

Improvising is the art of being able to play a solo that fits well and sounds good over a seemingly infinite amount of randomly constructed chord progressions or musical compositions. There’s usually little time to think in advance about what you can play other than maybe a quick glance at the chord progression but more often than not, your thinking needs to be done purely on the fly. So how do you go about learning this when nobody, and no book, can give you a logical explanation of how it’s done or even where to start.

In the past, I myself, bought many books on the subject of improvising and playing lead guitar. To be honest, I thought they all contained pretty much the same information, “here is a minor pentatonic scale”, “here is a blues scale”, “play this over a I-IV-V progression” and “here are some pentatonic licks that you already have in every other book you own and they’re boring anyway!”… er, sorry, but am I missing something?.. I thought the title of the book was “learn how to improvise on the guitar”!!!!.

I can pretty much guarantee that if I bought a book titled: “A detailed and logical approach to solving the mystery of guitar improvising, nothing left unexplained, learn to improvise over any chord progression” it would still pretty much add up to “here is a blues scale”!

You might have noticed my overuse of the word “think” in my other articles and lessons, well here it comes again because we need to think about a few things here, especially point 5.

• Every book on improvising tells you nothing much about learning how to improvise, only how to play a scale over a common chord progression (more or less)
• Most books about lead guitar and improvising show you a few scales and some guitar licks, little else
• Some of these books teach you basic and sometimes advanced music theory but don’t tell you how to apply any of it in the real world
• It’s pretty likely that there isn’t a book in existence that can explain it logically if at all
• There are many guitarist’s that have become great improvisers, are self taught and yet learnt everything they know from the books like those listed above!

This last point is a fact, therefore it obviously tells us something very important.
The answer can only lie within you and the way you interpret the information!!.
Well that’s a great statement, I bet now you know this you’ll suddenly find you have the answer to all your questions!

But seriously, if you have been playing guitar for a long while and you still find the subject of improvising daunting, even though you have tried and tried, then it’s time to step back, slow down a little and start thinking about the whole subject differently.

The main difference between you and the person that has no problem with it is likely to be because you are searching too hard for logical answers whereas the other guitarist isn’t particularity bothered about logical explanations. This is one of the hardest things to grasp and I know how this feels because I am that type of person (or at least I used to be). Everything I learn I need to understand, it needs to make sense and needs to have a logical explanation. Unfortunately where music is concerned, logic doesn’t really belong, at best all you can have are some guidelines to work with.

On the other hand, music theory itself is a method of applying logic to an otherwise incredibly confusing art form but the more you get involved with it the more you will find it contradicting, not just here and there but often. The intermediate level of music theory becomes more contradictory than basic theory and it’s not until you get into the advanced levels that the contradictions start to unfold and make some kind of sense at which point, believe it or not, it suddenly seems almost logical.

There are a few very important things (among others) that you need to have experience in and understand in order to be a confident improviser.

• Understand that different styles use different ideas. This is not to say that you can’t mix these ideas into other styles, they are in fact mixed all the time. If however, you play rock music using purely jazz ideas then the result will be jazz with a rocky feel to it. This may or may not be the sound you are going for
• You need a good ear
• Good technique
• Know every note on the fretboard without having to think about it
• You need to have a good knowledge of basic theory even if this is something you only apply subconsciously through experience

The first three points are what I would call definite requirements. Fretboard knowledge is something that might not stop you becoming a good improviser but once you have it you are guaranteed to improve by a huge amount.

Then there’s theory which always brings on the big theory vs non theory debate so lets start by saying that some styles require it and some don’t. If however you know the basics then you will improve greatly no matter what the style, theory only stifles creativity if you allow it to. If you use it as a tool then the only thing you can gain from it is more ideas. This is an unarguable fact, those that continue to argue it stifles creativity quite simply don’t understand how to make proper use of it.

Many of those that claim not to know it, do in fact know more than they realise because their playing style is still bound by the same set of rules as theory would dictate for that style. The difference is they figure out in their own way instead of learning the mathematics.

You don’t need to be a theory guru, just the basics can take you a long way into making you a better player but just how much you need to learn really depends on the style of music you play. If all you ever want to do is play 12 bar blues and sound like all other 12 bar blues players then learning theory might be something that offers little benefit to you, after all many blues players don’t know music theory anyway. This is however a bit deceptive and outlines what I said above about people knowing some theory without realising it.

A very important thing to remember is music is not a product of theory but rather theory is a product of music. Before blues was invented there was no theory around to explain it, in fact as far as theory goes blues very much breaks the rules. Theory itself is nothing more than an attempt to create a mathematical or logical explanation to why we tend to like certain sounds and not others. The original blues men themselves invented the sound and it became extremely popular. You cant have a theory that tries to argue it’s not possible to like something just because it don’t make mathematical sense, so instead, theory has to adapt. No sooner than it adapts, along comes another style that needs more explaining.

Music theory as we know it is mostly of no real use outside of western music. It’s the science for the styles we are used to hearing, based on a twelve note scale. Whether you know theory or not, it’s pretty likely that the music you play will still be using the same rules as the particular style you favour, so avoiding it is fairly pointless.

The art of improvisation has no real way of being explained fully in any detail and can only be learned by making use of the knowledge you have and experimenting with it. If anything makes it a black art then it is this. Your brain needs to figure it out for itself by piecing together little bits of information at a time. Try too hard and you will probably achieve nothing.

This is difficult to take in if you can’t make sense of any of it. This is the one area that you just have believe that ideas need to be built on and decoded in your own way. Sometimes things don’t make any sense for a long while and this is why variety is an important part of learning to improvise. If you don’t keep trying different things then you’ll have nothing to make comparisons with to get that sudden moment of understanding. Knowing basic music theory will help you get these moments. You are in a catch 22 and need to find ways to break the loop.

So how should you go about building these ideas?

Go to part 2