How do I learn to improvise on the guitar (beginner)?
I think we all agree that improvisation is not the same as scales.
On the one hand, you need the scale as a kind of “guideline,” but on the other hand, this guideline quickly becomes a habit and it sounds like you’re really just playing scales up and down.
There is a solution for this: Restrictions!
Restriction 1: Time
Playing a 5-minute solo is very, very difficult. That’s why you don’t do it. You run out of ideas and you really just end up playing scales up and down.
So we create a chord progression and make sure that the improvisation part is so short that we only have a little time to improvise.
The reason is: If you have less time for an improvisation, you will automatically (after a while) become more creative. You know that you only have these few seconds and have to pull out all the stops.
A more or less simple accompaniment would look something like this:
In the audio examples, I play freely within the restrictions. You shouldn’t play freely at the beginning and learn one thing after another before you combine them.
We first play the Am7 with a relatively simple rhythm and then go to the D7 (or D9), which is played in anticipation (an eighth note too early).
After that, you have a whole bar to improvise.
For the improvisation at the beginning, I would start with the Am pentatonic scale.
Restriction 2: Number of Notes
At the beginning, you should start with as few notes as possible. It is already difficult enough to find and play the given rhythm again in time.
Therefore, you can build this up.
First we start with one note. Only when you don’t have to think anymore should you “grab” a second note.
The distance between improvisation and the repeating accompaniment at the beginning will logically become shorter. Therefore, you should take a few days for each additional note.
In the audio examples, I play freely within the restrictions. You shouldn’t play freely at the beginning and learn one thing after another before you combine them.
Restriction 3: Rhythm of the Improvisation
Since many other factors are a problem at the beginning, such as getting back into the rhythm in time or even finding the scale during the short improvisation phase, we should fall back on simple rhythms.
A simple increase here would be:
Quarter note — Four notes possible
Eighth note — Eight notes possible
Eighth note triplets — 12 notes possible
Sixteenth note — 16 notes possible
This is not even about playing as well or beautifully as possible, but simply about packing as many notes as possible into the improvisation bar and returning to the chords in time.
In the audio examples, I play freely within the restrictions. You shouldn’t play freely at the beginning and learn one thing after another before you combine them.
Restriction 4: Certain Notes from the Scale
Now we have set a time limit, are only allowed to play a certain number of notes and the rhythm is also specified. The last thing would be to tinker with the scale.
Here we could prescribe that certain strings should be omitted.
So we simply leave out the A, G and high E strings and try to improvise only on the other three strings.
Again, it doesn’t sound great right away. The goal of these exercises is to get out of our familiar patterns in order to find new ways.
After that you can change and the strings that were not played before are now played and vice versa.
In the audio examples, I play freely within the restrictions. You shouldn’t play freely at the beginning and learn one thing after another before you combine them.
Across the Bar
In the cross-bar variant, we play the rhythm, but the improvisation can last a little longer. The difficulty here is that we should always know where we are.
During the improvisation it is therefore important to always know which chord is actually being played.
In the audio examples, I play freely within the restrictions. You shouldn’t play freely at the beginning and learn one thing after another before you combine them.
Combination
These four restrictions should all be learned in isolation. You shouldn’t start with all the restrictions from the beginning and try to implement them musically.
You should learn one of them intensively for a few days, then move on to the next and keep the first one in the back of your mind as best as you can.
In the best case, the muscle memory is already far enough and kicks in automatically!
Rhythmic and Harmonic Motifs
Let’s assume that after weeks of training the individual restrictions, everything is perfect and works exactly as it should, then you could make the whole thing musical with rhythmic motifs. That’s how it would actually sound like a good improvisation! 🙂
In the audio examples, I play freely within the restrictions. You shouldn’t play freely at the beginning and learn one thing after another before you combine them.
