Learn how to do simple guitar improvisation, even if you are a beginner, with this simple method taught by Guitar Control instructor Darrin Goodman, aka Uncle D. Be sure to get the free tabs and click the link for the backing track and you will be improvising some sweet melodies in record time.
Introduction
How’s it going everybody? This is Darrin with GuitarControl.com bringing you this video lesson and today I want to show you a real easy way, even if you’re a total beginner, to do simple improvisation, little melodies and the beginnings of a guitar solo.
So right now, Guitar Control is giving away this really awesome daily practice routine to improve your lead guitar chops. This was put together by our very own Silvio Gazquez, a two-time Guitar Idle finalist. This routine covers the four main concepts that are necessary for lead guitar; alternate picking, legato, sweep picking and tapping. All the tabs and exercises are all included in this free ebook and there’s a link in the description where you can get yours.
So be sure to click on the link in the description for the tabs and let’s get close up and take a look at this.
Improvisation For Beginners
All right, so the first thing if you already know your major scale then you could possibly already be where you’re not going to get the first benefit of this. I actually found two benefits from working with this. So I just want to show you this because this is something you should know anyway, this is just your major scale, the Ionian mode three notes per string. So in the tabs I’ve got it in G so we’re starting here on the third fret. So it’s three, five, seven and then on the A string, three, five, seven. Then on the D string I have to go up a half step and now we’re at the fourth fret, four, five, seven and then four, five, seven on the G string. And then now we’re going to shift up a half step again so now we’re starting on the fifth fret of the B string; so five, seven, eight and then on the high E string five, seven, eight… All right so you can use that scale and you can make Melodies and everything out of it. But one of the things that is an issue when you’re first starting to try to do this is you just don’t really kind of know what to do and it ends up just being like scale being played ascending and descending. So one of the things that you know like I’ve talked about before, other teachers talk about, is just make it more musical by skipping over notes and don’t play a bunch of sequential notes. So I want to show you a really easy way that you can improvise to get started with this and you don’t even have to know that scale so this is a really, really simple thing. So if we if you look at the second half of the pattern or the second section of tabs, if we look at this scale we’ve got three, five and seven. So we’re playing the fifth and seventh fret on the E string and then the A string again on the D string, even though we shift up, we’re still getting the fifth and the seventh fret and then the same on the G string, same on the B string, same on the highest string. So the fifth and seventh fret is played on every string throughout that scale and so if you play it like that… it doesn’t sound like a scale, it’s not super musical either, but it’s broken up because we’re actually starting on the second. So it’s like we’re going two, three, five, six, eight, two and so on and so forth…
So if you know what key you’re going to play over like a backing track or something like the one I was using at the beginning, which by the way there is a link in the description where you can you can use that backing track just here on YouTube. It’s a really good channel with lots of backing tracks and this one’s just like really perfect for a beginner and it’s the one of the best ones I found for doing this. So all you have to know is that whatever key you’re in. So if we were in the key of G, G is here, so you just move up a whole step and then your first finger will play every fret on every string on that fret and then a whole step up from there with your third finger. So if we were going to play like in that backing track for instance is in the key of C, so we’d have to come to C here on the eighth fret and now we move up a whole step and now we’re going to be playing 10 and 12… Okay so now I’m going to put that backing track back on again and just kind of go over some stuff with that along with that. So if we put it on we just play… whoops, try it on the right frets. So each note doesn’t sound bad, but it’s we still haven’t got really much of a melody… So I’m just using four notes there… Let’s try the other strings… As you can see in here it’s like really easy to come up with something over this. So like I said there is a link where you can go to that YouTube video and you know, get the tabs so you have the patterns and then I’m just doing that, just play over it and just try different things. You’ll notice that some of the notes sound better. Like you might think that you play these or a certain set of notes and sometimes it sounds good and sometimes it doesn’t sound as good, so it just depends on which chord and the progression it’s over. So you can just kind of you know that chord’s coming up even if you don’t know what chord it is, just by the sound you can go, okay well this is where I like this part and you can really kind of put some kind of a melody together. Now I have some doing some bending in there so I want to show you something. So if you were playing the major scale… the next note on the B and the high E string is just up a half step. So what I was doing there is I was bending that note up to here, now on the G string it’s actually a whole step, so you could bend it up a whole step. Now what I found interesting with this is that for myself it forced me to have to do things differently than I would normally do. Normally if I was playing I might go and slide into that note, but since I didn’t want to deviate from these frets it made me have to play a little bit differently…
Conclusion
All right, so I hope that you found this helpful and like I said this is really kind of aimed at the beginners, but like I said for myself personally it made me have to play different and made me think about the note selection a little bit differently. So that was kind of interesting it caused me to do a little melody that’s kind of things I would normally play. So if you like this lesson be sure to give me a thumbs up and leave a comment down below if you have any questions about this or other guitar related topics. If you haven’t already done so please subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss any of the content that we upload throughout the week. Well that is all I have for you today. Thanks for watching and have a great day.
