Soloing | Improv Archives - Page 7 of 12

Combining Minor and Major Pentatonic Scales

Combining minor and major pentatonic scales The minor pentatonic is the most important scale in blues and rock music. It’s an awesome scale and sounds great, no doubt about it. There are a million ways to express your emotions through the minor pentatonic and use it for your soloing.

However it always has that same dark classic minor pentatonic sound. It doesn’t take you anywhere else. Combining the minor pentatonic and the major pentatonic will take you to different places.

Suddenly you have the ability to produce the same kind of sounds and licks you hear in the solos of Eric Clapton, B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Combining the notes will give you a wide selection of flavors to choose from and to play around with. You will keep attracting the listeners attention with all these extra lovely notes that will make your soloing a lot more interesting.

So how do you approach this? Let’s take a closer look. Continue Reading

6 Reasons You Want to Learn the Notes on The Fretboard and How

By Klaus Crow 11 Comments

In this lesson you’re going to discover Why you need to Learn The Notes on the Fretboard and How. It may seem obvious that when you learn to play guitar you also need to learn the notes on the fretboard. How can you play music without knowing the note names? Well believe it or not, there are a lot of guitar players out there who don’t have the slightest clue what they are playing and they do just fine.

I didn’t know all the notes on the fretboard for a long time either. And yes I could still play all my favorite tunes and improvise over chord progressions. But there were limitations that I wasn’t aware of at the time. Huge limitations!

Once I started learning the notes on the strings and figuring out what the notes of chords, scales and licks were, things started to change. One discovery let to another and a lot of things suddenly made sense and became clearer. My knowledge expanded and my playing improved. I learned all this in small steps.

Top 30 Easy Guitar Solos

By Klaus Crow 20 Comments

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Do you know any easy guitar solos?

It’s one of the most asked questions I get from guitar players who are just starting out playing solo guitar. And I get that.

The most solos you hear in songs are not exactly beginner solos. They are often intermediate or advanced guitar solos.

For the beginner lead guitar player it almost feels like every solo is out of reach and that can be discouraging. How do other guitar players go about this?

Well almost every guitar player starts off with an easy guitar solo. Those who don’t are up for a major challenge and often left disappointed. You’ve got to work your way up one solo at a time.

My first solo was Wonderful tonight by Eric Clapton. Beautiful, short and fairly easy.

Once you practiced a couple of solos and you get the hang of the basic techniques like pull-offs, hammer-ons, slides and bend-ups it get’s easier and more fun. Then you also want to work on scales, dexterity and speed which you will achieve with regular practice and specific exercises.

But first thing first, let’s start off with choosing one easy guitar solo and have loads of fun with.

You can click the song title and listen to the song and solo on Youtube or click Tab to find the tablature for the song.

Note: As an Amazon associate I earn from qualifying purchases via amazon links.

Enjoy!

1 – Wonderful tonight – Eric Clapton Tabs

2 – High and dry – Radiohead Tabs

3 – Smells like teen spirit – Nirvana Tabs

4 – Let it be – The Beatles Tabs – More TABS on Amazon

5 – Californication – RHCP Tabs
Continue Reading

What is a Scale Formula and How to Use it For Guitar

By Klaus Crow 16 Comments

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guitar and the power of failure Everything evolves around scales. We use scales to create music, study music theory, understand music, build chords, progressions, arpeggios and learn soloing and improvisation.

So how do you build a scale with a formula, how do you figure out the notes for a particular scale, what else can you do with a scale formula and how can you make sense of it all?

Well, let’s find out.

The scale formula gives you insight in the notes you play. It gives you a clear overview of how scales relate to each other and reveals the easiness of building any scale in seconds.

It also a great tool for learning and understanding chord construction and soloing. Once you know the logic behind a scale and how to use the formula, a lot of pieces to the puzzle will fall into place one step at a time.

To construct or build a scale we need a major scale and a scale formula. We use the major scale as groundwork and reference point for building all the other scales and then apply the appropriate scale formula to fill in the notes. Continue Reading

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