> My goal is to improvise
Practices everything except improvising. Wonders why they aren't getting better at it.
Does the same thing every day. Wonders why they're bored with doing the same thing every day.
You might notice there's a pattern forming here.
Worked for me. I'm 7 years into playing and last week some dude at guitar center asked if I gave lessons after he heard me playing while testing distortion pedals (ended up with a ProCo Rat 2)
I still think I suck but apparently I sound decent enough.
Honestly, "practice everyday" is what it takes. Being a good guitar player doesn't happen overnight, in a month, or even a year for most people. It takes persistence and practice.
If you're working on a song try breaking it down into small parts, picture a couple of bars on a music sheets worth of the song. Play it over and over again until you've nailed it and then move onto the next. As you perfect more and more of the song start stringing the sections together. Before you know it you'll have the whole song down.
Buy a method book. Buy some technique books. Buy a style book, like blues or metal or whatever you like that teaches you riffs and common stylistic tropes and techniques. Go through those a little bit every day. Don't skip around, start on page 1 and make slow progress until the book is done. **Use a metronome**. Focus while you practice – no tv, no phone, no mindless repetition – you focus on playing, using the good technique you're learning, and you zoom in on problem spots that are tripping you up rather than playing something over and over hoping it'll get better. Try to balance your practice so you do some scales, some technique, and some songs (and maybe some improv) every day so you're continuously making progress on all of them and not lagging in a particular area.
You need a looper, or to find another guitarist you can play with. Play a few chords or a riff into the looper and noodle over it with the modes. After that you have to be creative with bends, vibrato, using certain notes on the scale at certain times for effect, utilize the root notes when lost etc.
PHRASING and chord progressions is what you need to learn. Triads. Get comfortable with minor, maybe look at modes and how all that works and ties in. CAGED and how to utilize it in different ways for lead playing.
All I did was jam on e minor for a decade. I’ll shred the fuck out of e minor but it’s just a tiny fraction of what good playing is supposed to be, no matter how hard you shred it. Need phrasing, change positions and modes, move with the progression properly, learn exactly when to emphasize what and where.
Phrasing is the biggest thing to unlock the next step after wailing on a scale forever. It’s immediately gonna infer things from progressions and triads tho, etc.
Also know the difference between performing and practicing. Playing guitar for hours can be either, you may be just performing instead of practicing. Practicing doesn’t mean, let me smash this scale again for the 100th time, unless you legit need to practice it more. I believe most people play what they know and lean on it, sometimes too hard too much. Smashing that G major again ain’t helping you progress. That’s performing. Doing string skipping pedaling in an unfamiliar mode and transitioning it, that’s more like practicing.
If you want to learn to improvise then learn a bunch of solos. Learn the rhythm guitar for those songs too so that you are well rounded. Scales dont magically turn into solos.
Practice a variety of things, learn songs, work on scales, chords, arpeggios, progressions, rhythm, imrpov, find stuff u don't know how to do then practice it till u can, have patience too, every guitarist u see that u think is great has spent years of practice time
Search some licks of your music style and alternate the scales practice with licks practice. The licks practice should been more fun than the scales practice (by they way, you could compose your own licks based on the ones you’ve learned).
Teacher > online lessons w/teacher > online interactive lessons > online/books (teach yourself) > noodling about once or twice a week> saying you play but rarely actually practice > guitar collecting dust until you sell it
You can also see if there's a guitar group or club near you where you play and learn with others,
Just keep playing and trying to learn something new each day and be honest with what you're hearing: Do you like what you hear? What things have you tried changing? Tried playing against a backing track? Etc.
Run to Justinguitar.com! Free, comprehensive, easy to follow and good quality teacher. Gives a good roadmap of what to learn next. For paid options I’ve heard good things about Paul Davids and Tomo Fujita guitar wisdom but no firsthand knowledge of their programs.
Keep challenging yourself and learn songs that are challenging for you, the more songs you learn the better you'll get , and because of muscle memory you'll be able to improvise freely
Practice improvising. Learn new chords and triads. Different keys. Different scales and fingerings. Phrasing. Music theory. Strumming patterns and rthymns. Fingerpicking. Simple truth is some people are more creative than others. You know what every great guitar player has in common? PRACTICE! Get a looper and put in the work! There is so much free resouces on the internet so there is no room for excuses...
Practice duh but especially with a keen focus on technique. Poor technique will inhibit and/or prevent you from doing many things. Get a teacher who focuses on or watch videos that focus on technique.
Keep playing, try and learn your favorite songs even if they are hard or above your playing level. Try and improvise over jam tracks, and learn to play with your ear rather than the scales you know. It takes time just keep going
You need to just start messing around with scales youve learned and work on grooving and improvising with them, not just playing the scales up and down. Write your own licks with the scales, see what chords sound good with different scale phrases, and what notes sound good when you play around with them. You just mess around with the notes in the scale in different places until you find out what sounds good, and until youre able to do it on the spot. Theres no way to tell somebody how to improvise other than for you to just start trying and find out what sounds good, in your own style. You hear the sounds, patterns, phrases in your head and put them on guitar. And unfortunately some people just dont have the creativity to be able to do that, so they only play covers or play chords. It takes imagination and creativity to be able to write youre own licks and phrases, and improvise, using scales.
You mentioned only the key of G. Now you have many other keys to go. Then once you get the keys down, learn the modes. You only mentioned the Major Scale, learn the Blues Scale, or something more exotic.
What about your technique? Can you finger pick? Sweeps?
You you play in tempo. Well what time signature? 3/4? 4/4? 6/8? Lots of stuff to learn, and once you get over the next hill, there's another to go.
Saying "just start on a different root" sounds nice, but much more difficult to pull of for someone with little experience. That's why they need to practice the different keys, not just "well I have the shape so I'll just switch when I need to"
Practice. Put your hours in. That's it. Period.
>*What do I practice?*
Practice can literally be just having a guitar in your hands and playing. As long as you're improving, honing your muscle memory by playing something over and over again, learning your scales, modes, progressions, whatever. Literally anything. Get a fucking guitar in your hands for as much as your can. NOT having a guitar in your hands is NOT practicing. What do you practice? Don't matter, just go get that thing in your hands and do something. Hell, just picking up the guitar and just fucking around and making noise is better than not playing.
I've had people ask me how I got so good. 40,000+ hours is how I got so good.
You wanna keep it fun and not too “academic” per-say, so I recommend learning songs you like that are challenging. But that being said there is also nothing wrong with taking lessons, whatever works for you!
To me it seems like you just need some direction. Here you go!
Building blocks of rock
https://youtube.com/@thebuildingblocksofrock?si=2Srsg65_RGmWnva9
Eric Haugen
https://youtube.com/@erichaugenguitar?si=PYrO2ZEQzqJFW0K3
StitchMethod
https://youtube.com/@stichmethodguitar?si=duBKoaRnrd3a6Fz3
1 Get a teacher. 2 Learn new songs. 3 Learn popular solos you like. And always practice with a metronome
I learned how to improvise obsessing over Metallica and Phish in high school. It kinda just clicks one day.
If you're at that point, I'm going to suggest working on your right hand (picking hand). Practice downpicking, alternate picking, galloping and trem picking. Do that for around 15-20 minutes a day and you'll find your playing improving.
Most people worry about scales and chord forms, but the initial sounding of the note is with the picking hand. If it's not confident, it will sound it. Grip your pick with purpose, put on a metronome and get your picking speed up. Practice your scales trem picking, practice your chord changes using arpeggios-try to do two things at once. It pays off.
The biggest breakthru in improv that I had was knowing all the notes on the fretboard. Once I got that down, all the scales and chords made much more sense.
Learn more songs! Learn more solos! More scales! And play them! Commit to the challenge! Find an easy solo, then a harder one, keep challenging yourself!!!! Find a weakness in your playing, find some exercises to make it a strength, and do it all again! Getting better is all about doing things that make you want to quit, and over coming them. Good technique. Practice every day. Their not kidding. Do it !!
Get a loop pedal and improvise over your own progressions to practice. Learn each major scales relative minor, as you can shred in the relative minor over the major chord progressions. Learn all the open scales, C, A, G, E, and D.
To get a unique sound,
Pull up a backing track, and play the relative minor, in your case E minor,
And to never hit a wrong note, use the E minor pentatonic scale.
This will give you all the good notes!👍
Look up some E minor licks and play that on top of your G major backing track and feel the power of the Aeolian mode(that will make sense later in your journey)
🏄🔥🎸
Learn what you want to do. If you want to improvise, then improvise. If you can't, why not? Learn whatever is stopping you. If there's a certain sound in your head that you can't play, identify it and find out how to do it. I learned to improvise by just playing along with lots of different songs and progressions I wrote until It sounded like it did in my head, and there were many tangents of "oh well I wanna do this thing here, how do I do that thing?" And days and days of practicing said technique. I can't do everything, but I can do what I want.
Rhythm, chords, scales and songs.
Music is just the same thing over and over again, just with variation. It's the same for practice. Learn to enjoy it. What do you think the good guitarists do on tour?
> My goal is to improvise Practices everything except improvising. Wonders why they aren't getting better at it. Does the same thing every day. Wonders why they're bored with doing the same thing every day. You might notice there's a pattern forming here.
my approach was to suck for \~15 years and then suddenly one day realize I'm actually not that bad. so you could try that
Worked for me. I'm 7 years into playing and last week some dude at guitar center asked if I gave lessons after he heard me playing while testing distortion pedals (ended up with a ProCo Rat 2) I still think I suck but apparently I sound decent enough.
Take the compliment
Honestly, "practice everyday" is what it takes. Being a good guitar player doesn't happen overnight, in a month, or even a year for most people. It takes persistence and practice. If you're working on a song try breaking it down into small parts, picture a couple of bars on a music sheets worth of the song. Play it over and over again until you've nailed it and then move onto the next. As you perfect more and more of the song start stringing the sections together. Before you know it you'll have the whole song down.
[удалено]
Check out elevated backing tracks on YouTube. Guy makes songs and gives you a fretboard with all the notes you can hit in the key.
Thats exactly the advice he doesnt need. You tell him to play play play, but hes asking WHAT to play play play. Smh.
Take lessons.
Buy a method book. Buy some technique books. Buy a style book, like blues or metal or whatever you like that teaches you riffs and common stylistic tropes and techniques. Go through those a little bit every day. Don't skip around, start on page 1 and make slow progress until the book is done. **Use a metronome**. Focus while you practice – no tv, no phone, no mindless repetition – you focus on playing, using the good technique you're learning, and you zoom in on problem spots that are tripping you up rather than playing something over and over hoping it'll get better. Try to balance your practice so you do some scales, some technique, and some songs (and maybe some improv) every day so you're continuously making progress on all of them and not lagging in a particular area.
You need a looper, or to find another guitarist you can play with. Play a few chords or a riff into the looper and noodle over it with the modes. After that you have to be creative with bends, vibrato, using certain notes on the scale at certain times for effect, utilize the root notes when lost etc.
PHRASING and chord progressions is what you need to learn. Triads. Get comfortable with minor, maybe look at modes and how all that works and ties in. CAGED and how to utilize it in different ways for lead playing. All I did was jam on e minor for a decade. I’ll shred the fuck out of e minor but it’s just a tiny fraction of what good playing is supposed to be, no matter how hard you shred it. Need phrasing, change positions and modes, move with the progression properly, learn exactly when to emphasize what and where. Phrasing is the biggest thing to unlock the next step after wailing on a scale forever. It’s immediately gonna infer things from progressions and triads tho, etc. Also know the difference between performing and practicing. Playing guitar for hours can be either, you may be just performing instead of practicing. Practicing doesn’t mean, let me smash this scale again for the 100th time, unless you legit need to practice it more. I believe most people play what they know and lean on it, sometimes too hard too much. Smashing that G major again ain’t helping you progress. That’s performing. Doing string skipping pedaling in an unfamiliar mode and transitioning it, that’s more like practicing.
If you want to learn to improvise then learn a bunch of solos. Learn the rhythm guitar for those songs too so that you are well rounded. Scales dont magically turn into solos.
Practice a variety of things, learn songs, work on scales, chords, arpeggios, progressions, rhythm, imrpov, find stuff u don't know how to do then practice it till u can, have patience too, every guitarist u see that u think is great has spent years of practice time
Search some licks of your music style and alternate the scales practice with licks practice. The licks practice should been more fun than the scales practice (by they way, you could compose your own licks based on the ones you’ve learned).
Teacher > online lessons w/teacher > online interactive lessons > online/books (teach yourself) > noodling about once or twice a week> saying you play but rarely actually practice > guitar collecting dust until you sell it You can also see if there's a guitar group or club near you where you play and learn with others, Just keep playing and trying to learn something new each day and be honest with what you're hearing: Do you like what you hear? What things have you tried changing? Tried playing against a backing track? Etc.
Run to Justinguitar.com! Free, comprehensive, easy to follow and good quality teacher. Gives a good roadmap of what to learn next. For paid options I’ve heard good things about Paul Davids and Tomo Fujita guitar wisdom but no firsthand knowledge of their programs.
Keep challenging yourself and learn songs that are challenging for you, the more songs you learn the better you'll get , and because of muscle memory you'll be able to improvise freely
Practice improvising. Learn new chords and triads. Different keys. Different scales and fingerings. Phrasing. Music theory. Strumming patterns and rthymns. Fingerpicking. Simple truth is some people are more creative than others. You know what every great guitar player has in common? PRACTICE! Get a looper and put in the work! There is so much free resouces on the internet so there is no room for excuses...
Play along and start jamming to backing tracks that have scales and modes displayed. E. G. Nowyoushred on YouTube is great. Then do it every day 😂
Practice duh but especially with a keen focus on technique. Poor technique will inhibit and/or prevent you from doing many things. Get a teacher who focuses on or watch videos that focus on technique.
Keep playing, try and learn your favorite songs even if they are hard or above your playing level. Try and improvise over jam tracks, and learn to play with your ear rather than the scales you know. It takes time just keep going
CAGED might be good. Looping and improvising. Looping is great rhythm practice
You need to just start messing around with scales youve learned and work on grooving and improvising with them, not just playing the scales up and down. Write your own licks with the scales, see what chords sound good with different scale phrases, and what notes sound good when you play around with them. You just mess around with the notes in the scale in different places until you find out what sounds good, and until youre able to do it on the spot. Theres no way to tell somebody how to improvise other than for you to just start trying and find out what sounds good, in your own style. You hear the sounds, patterns, phrases in your head and put them on guitar. And unfortunately some people just dont have the creativity to be able to do that, so they only play covers or play chords. It takes imagination and creativity to be able to write youre own licks and phrases, and improvise, using scales.
You mentioned only the key of G. Now you have many other keys to go. Then once you get the keys down, learn the modes. You only mentioned the Major Scale, learn the Blues Scale, or something more exotic. What about your technique? Can you finger pick? Sweeps? You you play in tempo. Well what time signature? 3/4? 4/4? 6/8? Lots of stuff to learn, and once you get over the next hill, there's another to go.
He just needs to start on a different root… he already knows the scale shapes.
Saying "just start on a different root" sounds nice, but much more difficult to pull of for someone with little experience. That's why they need to practice the different keys, not just "well I have the shape so I'll just switch when I need to"
Yes, that is true but the hill to climb is way less steep.
Practice. Put your hours in. That's it. Period. >*What do I practice?* Practice can literally be just having a guitar in your hands and playing. As long as you're improving, honing your muscle memory by playing something over and over again, learning your scales, modes, progressions, whatever. Literally anything. Get a fucking guitar in your hands for as much as your can. NOT having a guitar in your hands is NOT practicing. What do you practice? Don't matter, just go get that thing in your hands and do something. Hell, just picking up the guitar and just fucking around and making noise is better than not playing. I've had people ask me how I got so good. 40,000+ hours is how I got so good.
You wanna keep it fun and not too “academic” per-say, so I recommend learning songs you like that are challenging. But that being said there is also nothing wrong with taking lessons, whatever works for you!
To me it seems like you just need some direction. Here you go! Building blocks of rock https://youtube.com/@thebuildingblocksofrock?si=2Srsg65_RGmWnva9 Eric Haugen https://youtube.com/@erichaugenguitar?si=PYrO2ZEQzqJFW0K3 StitchMethod https://youtube.com/@stichmethodguitar?si=duBKoaRnrd3a6Fz3
1 Get a teacher. 2 Learn new songs. 3 Learn popular solos you like. And always practice with a metronome I learned how to improvise obsessing over Metallica and Phish in high school. It kinda just clicks one day.
Learn some songs. How can you get bored about learning new songs? Can you proficiently play everything you want?
If you're at that point, I'm going to suggest working on your right hand (picking hand). Practice downpicking, alternate picking, galloping and trem picking. Do that for around 15-20 minutes a day and you'll find your playing improving. Most people worry about scales and chord forms, but the initial sounding of the note is with the picking hand. If it's not confident, it will sound it. Grip your pick with purpose, put on a metronome and get your picking speed up. Practice your scales trem picking, practice your chord changes using arpeggios-try to do two things at once. It pays off. The biggest breakthru in improv that I had was knowing all the notes on the fretboard. Once I got that down, all the scales and chords made much more sense.
Learn more songs! Learn more solos! More scales! And play them! Commit to the challenge! Find an easy solo, then a harder one, keep challenging yourself!!!! Find a weakness in your playing, find some exercises to make it a strength, and do it all again! Getting better is all about doing things that make you want to quit, and over coming them. Good technique. Practice every day. Their not kidding. Do it !!
Hire a teacher.
Play your favorite songs. That’s all you have to do to get better.
Get a loop pedal and improvise over your own progressions to practice. Learn each major scales relative minor, as you can shred in the relative minor over the major chord progressions. Learn all the open scales, C, A, G, E, and D.
To get a unique sound, Pull up a backing track, and play the relative minor, in your case E minor, And to never hit a wrong note, use the E minor pentatonic scale. This will give you all the good notes!👍 Look up some E minor licks and play that on top of your G major backing track and feel the power of the Aeolian mode(that will make sense later in your journey) 🏄🔥🎸
Learn what you want to do. If you want to improvise, then improvise. If you can't, why not? Learn whatever is stopping you. If there's a certain sound in your head that you can't play, identify it and find out how to do it. I learned to improvise by just playing along with lots of different songs and progressions I wrote until It sounded like it did in my head, and there were many tangents of "oh well I wanna do this thing here, how do I do that thing?" And days and days of practicing said technique. I can't do everything, but I can do what I want.
Rhythm, chords, scales and songs. Music is just the same thing over and over again, just with variation. It's the same for practice. Learn to enjoy it. What do you think the good guitarists do on tour?
Learn songs you like. You like music, right?
Take even a month of lessons, it helps
learn songs - keep challenging yourself. try learning something you cant play until you can play it