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