improvisation Archives - GUITARHABITS

Best Guitar Jam Tracks and Song Backing Tracks

Whether you are practicing rhythm along with a backing track, perfecting your guitar solo, or expanding your improvisation skills over a jam track, you will find it a true joy and it’s SO good for your guitar playing.

Practicing with jam and backing tracks develops and enhances your rhythm, feel and timing for music and your ability to lock into the groove of the drum and bass, which is an imperative skill for any musician.

When you study a lead guitar solo it’s good to play along with the track without actually hearing the original notes of the solo and learn to fill in your solo between the spaces while keeping up with the right tempo, timing and feel of the song.

It’s the perfect way to practice what it’s like to play with a real band and what that requires from your playing. You have to learn and memorize songs, practicing them over and over until you get it right from beginning to end, until you feel comfortable enough to play it in front of an audience.

If you want to get good at soloing & improvisation, jam tracks are the best tools to exercise, drill, explore and train yourself for the challenge of playing over chord progressions. It’s a must-do.

So today, we got some great hiqh quality sounding jam & backing tracks for every kind of musical style and purpose.

Now you know what to do. Set aside a part of your daily workout to practice with jam & backing tracks and watch your playing improve and unfold.

Enjoy!

BLUES, FUNK, MINOR & MAJOR KEY JAMTRACKS

1 – Tom Bailey Backingtracks

2 – MyDarnJamTracks

3 – JamTracksChannel

4 – GuitarBackingTrackVideos (Artmant Studios)

5 – MegaBackingTracks

20 Ways to Improve Your Improvisation Skills

By Klaus Crow 3 Comments

Bigstock photo
Learning to improvise is a covetable skill and it is the next step to becoming a more accomplished guitar player once you’ve mastered a decent amount of guitar solos.

Improvisation gives you the freedom to express and explore your creativity on the guitar.

When you’re the lead guitar player in a band it’s a necessity but also an incredible feeling to be able to compose a solo on the spot anytime it’s required.

Delivering a fresh, original, sweet rocking solo will be the icing on the cake.

In truth, improvisation is really the spontaneous and creative reorganization of things you already know. So you need to build and accumulate a soloing vocabulary from which you can create.

Here are 20 ways to build that vocabulary and improve your improvisation skills.

Apply these tips to your daily practice routine to get the best out of yourself!

Here are the keys:

1 – Learn new licks
Keep amassing fresh original licks from different styles and genres.

2 – Listen good and listen a lot
Listen, really listen to guitar solos of your favorite guitarists and also listen to various guitar players to expand your horizon. Study their phrasing.Continue Reading

The Importance and Value of Learning Lead Guitar Solos

By Klaus Crow 4 Comments

Bigstock photo
When I first started playing electric guitar (4 years after I picked up the acoustic guitar) all I wanted to do is learn those almighty guitar solos of Slash, Nuno Bettencourt, Joe Satriani, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Scott Henderson, Marty Friedman, Kirk Hammet, Dimebag Darrel and other great legends.

It was the best thing ever. Unawarely I built my guitar vocabulary like that.

After a while fellow musicians, guitar teachers and guitar players from around town that I looked up to were advising me to develop my own style and learn to improvise. It was the obvious next step to becoming a better guitar player.

I practiced scales, sequences, licks, arpeggios, intervals, just about anything I could get my hands on and continued to work on my improvisation skills. Freedom on the fretboard at last.

Then I started playing in bands doing covers, creating and performing my own music. Playing some more and more and more. Time went by and I gained a lot of gigging experience, developed my own style, learned a lot of new things, but on the other side I also stopped building and expanding my guitar vocabulary.

Years later I got back into transcribing and practicing solos by other guitar heros that found my interest. It was refreshing, inspiring and opened up new worlds. It took my soloing to other places and improved my playing once again.

To gain input and keep educating yourself you got to keep practicing, studying and memorizing guitar solos regularly. It’s like reading a new book or watching a brilliant movie to fuel your inspiration.

Besides that there are also other important reasons and benefits to learning lead guitar solos.

Check them out:Continue Reading

How to Improve Your Lead Guitar Phrasing

By Klaus Crow 12 Comments

Photo by Bigstock photo
For guitar players who starting out learning to improvise, it can be quite a challenge.

Playing a bunch of notes within the pentatonic scale (or any scale in that matter) is one thing, but being able to really tell a story with those notes is a complete different thing.

Because that’s what phrasing is all about: “How you tell a story”.

If you’re telling a story you want to draw the audience’s attention. We’ve all come across those boring teachers in the classroom who can’t keep your attention for more than 30 seconds. They talk in the same low monotone voice on and on and on and on. It’s almost like they don’t even breath. They probably don’t. :)

The fact that they can’t keep your attention has nothing to do with the subject, but it has to do with how they present the subject, how they bring you the story. And they forget the most important thing. They have to bring the story to life!

To bring a story to life you want to hear and feel the passion. You can hear that in the way people speak. When people get excited about stuff they tend to raise their voice. If they want to tell you a secret or gossip they start to whisper. If something is really important we will emphasize particular words. When someone tells you a creepy story they’ll start to talk slower, fuel their voice by fire and when the story gets really exciting they’ll suddenly pause to get you to the edge of your seat and then relentlessly take you to the climax.

There are dozen ways to draw the listener’s ears and fortunately for a lot of people that goes without saying. Most people will talk passionately about their new bought car, their cool job or an attractive person of the opposite sex. The same applies to music. You want to hear the same excitement in your soloing. To do so you have to learn great phrasing.

Phrasing is not about what you play but how you play it!

Let’s see what you can do to improve your phrasing and make your playing come alive:
Continue Reading