In my honest opinion, it just takes practice just like everything else.
Just try to improvise using simple melodies and as you go on, I'm sure you will improve
Good luck!

Unfortunately, span is a bit in the wrong.

If you don't know your scales like the back of your hand, then you can't improvise without screwing up. Scales embedded in your brain mean you'll know what you CAN play after any note you've started on. You'll also recognize the notes of a song and be able to play what you want along without being off-key.

The best way to go about this is to buy a scales book for guitar or a DVD and practice alot. And by alot I mean...ALOT. Practice remembering them, playing them very fast, etc. Sooner than later you'll realize you can nail those solos you have issues with because solos are pretty much only that. Scales.

Getting a scale book, would be a waste, since you can get all the information you need on the internet...

This is very true. For some reason, I assumed he knew how to play scales. Also, depending on the type of music you want to play, there are specific scales for that genre.. You might also want to look into that.

This is also true haha. You can just look these up online and print them out easily

so should i start learning my theory? all my scales and the circle of fifths?
relative keys and such?

learn scales and chords and how they relate and how to build, yea dont buy anything, internet is better if you know the sites.try a few different approuches to it alswell. like focusing on timeing itself and writing the time out then wingin/improv the notes into it or the opposite. pick series of notes or scales and put timeing. learn a few and make a few patterns then you like and could transpose and recall in any order of notes. practice transposeing a convorsations/phrase's into music. keep learning new songs or riffs to find ideas/patterns your not fluent with or you could use in your own stuff. check out tom hess's site articals, some cool idea's and thoery's. you could ZW chicken pick it all but you'd sound like a fool lol, feel the riffage your playing over or pick out notes from it or progression and re'use in any order that sounds good

if you learn a lesson, learn how to apply it to your own playing
remember to use dynamics and sticcatos and such.

in an effort to improve myself, i have downloaded guitar scales methoxd and guitar speed trainer.

My opinion on good improv is lots of improv.

Find a song - doesn't matter what it is, but stick it on and just play as MUCH different stuff as you can.

I recommend blues, old school rock n roll, ac/dc and instrumental stuff. These are very important because they use simple keys meaning you can improv to your ROOT note much quicker than lets say a doom metal song which may leap around the "key" if you will.

Improv is also about confidence. Have the confidence to play that next note, have the confidence to jump around the fretboard. And ofcourse - PRACTISE. This is the hard bit, because essentially you aren't sure what you are practising, but if you know 1 scale - that scale can be played in at the very least 24 positions on the fretboard - added to the fact you can mix it up, start at different parts of the scale etc.

I would just stick with powerchording the keys for the time being, unless you have mastered most barre chords and "jimi" chords etc.

I will try stick up a random ass improv over a song later this evening. I'm no Clapton so don't expect something spectacular lol

Improvising can be very complicated. It can also be very simple, and it is much better to start off as simple as you can, otherwise you will be overwhelmed quite quickly and what you produce will not be music.

Fundamentally, there are two ways you can approach improvising from within the key (you can, will, and should move outside of the key, but this is more complicated; as such, I'm not going to discuss it here).

The first way, which has been mentioned many times in this thread, is scalar playing. Almost any piece of music will have a key and a root. The idea behind scalar playing is to exploit the presence of a key signature to be selective about your notes -- Regular diatonic scales narrow the amount of possible notes down from twelve to seven, whereas hexatonic and pentatonic scales eliminate further notes (brining you down to 6 and 5, respectively). The basic advantage of this is that if you want to improvise over a piece and you know the applicable scale, it means that more than half of the notes on the fretboard will give you a place to start/end on because they will be in that key. Figuring out the key is not complex but requires that you familiarize yourself with which types of chords occur and where in a given scale. For example, let's take a very common progression...

C G Ami F

This is in the key of C major; there is no doubt about it. We also know that it is not employing a different root (IE it is not a mode of C major) because the resolve is to that C major chord. The two next most similar keys would be F major and G major: It can't be F major because G is the supertonic of F and would therefore be minor if tonic to F major. It can't be G major because there is no F in G major.

Given that information, we can fairly easily construct a solo by simply playing the C major scale. If each chord got two beats and we were playing a medium tempo 4/4 piece (Let it Be is this), you would get...



Now, this sounds passable, if not extremely boring. The problem is largely that everyone knows what the major scale sounds like even if they don't actually know what it sounds like, so this comes off as extremely basic. There are other problems -- namely that you hit the G on strange notes that you may not want (but you also may want; both the 6th/13th and the 7th are very useful, particularly on a dominant-functioning chord such as the G in C major) and that you arrive at your resolve too early by playing the C over F instead of playing it a beat later, but one thing that you will notice is that all of the notes sound very "inside" and that there are no dissonant sounds, except for one (The B over F -- there's a lot you can do about this). Given that simply playing up and down scales will invariably sound boring, what you need to learn about scalar playing is that the concept exists to provide you with a guideline: It is not a roadmap. It simply gives you the tools to be creative with. You will find that a boundless amount of music can be created simply by putting the notes of the scale in a different order. You can also start the scale on a different note to produce a mode (this is more compositional than improvisational, but the two are very heavily related).

I mentioned that playing a B over an F major chord is a dissonant sound -- this is because the interval is a tritone, which has a tendency to sound very tense to the ear. This is also one of the most important sounds in music, even if you don't hear it that way. Given that it sounds very tense, you can use the knowledge that playing a B over an F major chord will sound tense to selectively either avoid B -- when you don't want things to sound tense -- or to use B -- for when you do. You may also note that an F doesn't sound very good over a C major chord (b9 with E), or that a B over a D minor chord produces an interesting sound characteristic of the minor 6th chord and the Dorian mode (this happens because there's an F in D minor, and as previously mentioned, F and B produce a tritone). This is the kind of information that you will use to ultimately produce interesting solos: By knowing how each note of the scale "feels", you can go to a lot of different places with just the seven notes in your scale.
As an aside, a lot of people will tell you about the minor pentatonic or major pentatonic scales. These are definitely very handy, but you should understand that they work specifically by removing the more tense notes: There is no F or B in a C major pentatonic scale (CDEGA). The result of this is while it is very easy to produce a melodious solo using the pentatonic scale, it can be difficult to produce a solo with strongly varied amounts of tension. You should therefore treat such scales with discretion.


You may notice that I mentioned a lot about chords, which brings me to the other method of playing inside the key: Chordal playing. Chordal playing uses the notion that every chord is fundamentally just a bunch of notes to pick and choose which notes to play. I'm going to use the same example I used before to illustrate this, with the notes of the chord written underneath in case you don't know them.



You could build a pretty effective solo by just using the third of every chord, and maybe playing some scale notes around it to fill in some time. You could also build off of the fifth of each chord for a different sound. The root is valid as well. However, playing off of the same interval of every chord has a tendency to sound very blocky, as your solo has to jump the same distance as every chord change. So you can also approach this by playing horizontally (if you're not familiar with this term, to play horizontally is to minimize the amount of distance that you travel when you play). To accomplish this, you might use the third of C (E), the fifth of G (B), the root of Am (A), and the third of F (A). Or you might use the root of C, the third of G, the root of Am, and the fifth of F. The possibilities are virtually endless, especailly when you start using the scalar components that I discussed above to add in some extra notes.

It is important to know that when improvising using the information provided by chords, that you don't necessarily have to limit yourself to the notes played. For example, that C major chord is very basic on account of the fact that it is just a regular triad. You could call it a C6, giving you an extra note to play off of - A. Or you could call it a CMaj7, giving you a B. Or you can turn it into a C6/9, giving you A and D. These are chords that are implied by the piece you are playing, and this technique has a lot of depth to it. There are two rules to doing this; the first of which is inflexible, and the second is more food for thought.

1. You do not want to replace notes, you want to add them. What I mean by this is that if the rest of the band is playing C major (CEG) and you are playing C minor (CEbG) then you will clash violently, as the E and Eb both have the same function in their respective chords. This is basically never good. That is not to say that you can't play C minor over C major; however, what you are doing there is not implying a chord but rather tonicizing, which would require a much longer post than I have time to type up to explain.

2. If you imply a chord inside the key, it will sound inside the key. If you implie a chord outside of the key, it will sound outside of the key. Let's say you're in C major (big surprise right?). The notes in C major are CDEFGAB. If the chord you imply contains, say, a Bb, it will sound outside of the key. So if you imply a C7 (CEGBb) over the C major in the progression that we've been using up until that point, the Bb will sound like an outside note. It is inherently more difficult to make notes outside of the key work, but the payoff tends to be much greater when they do. This will take quite a bit of practice, so don't worry if you make a lot of funny sounds in the process.

Ultimately, you will seek to combine scalar and chordal playing to create your solos: The chordal knowledge will tell you the context of the notes you're playing within the immediate soundscape and the scalar knowledge will tell you the context of the notes you're playing in a broader context. It is also important to note that this post is not a definitive guide and I'm mostly just discussing a starting point. As you get more and more advanced you will likely find it more necessary to play outside of the scale and outside of the chord. I have also not discussed important improvisational elements like passing tones/chords, chromaticism, and modulation; the rabbit hole is very deep. The most singular advice I can give on the matter is that you are ultimately just trying to create music. Make a melody, don't make notes.



Do me a personal favor and don't do this. Power chords include only the fifth, which is generally the least consequential note in the chord from the perspective of a (prospective) improviser. You should make an effort to learn the chords, note-for-note. You can voice them however you want if it makes playing them more comfortable, but when Jimmi plays a purple haze, you should know that he's playing a 7#9. Also, playing power chords over diminished chords or augmented chords of any capacity sounds horrible as they don't contain natural fifths.

This post was edited by Me2NiK on Jul 25 2011 03:04am