Here it is.
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Richard. Thanks for that. Obviously with you playing over a backing track the gaps make more sense. I wasn’t so gaps sound odd. All I need now is a nice slow backing track.
Separately the track you played had a wierd drone all the way through it. Was that intentional and ig yes what was it?
Created in Guitar Pro.
Drums.
Bass playing shuffle eighths on the root notes only.
Rhythm guitar playing chunka-chunka on 2-strings only.
I didn’t spend much time mixing levels. See if this is better - the bass is lower in the mix now.
Hi. I have a question that’s really bugging me.
In one of the previous lessons in this grade Justin taught alternate picking for scales. Now it’s finally starting to feel natural. But during this blues improvisation the picking he uses seems to my eye to be somewhat random in the sense that it doesn’t follow the down on the beat and up on the off beat.
So my question is what do I do when it comes to picking direction when improvising?
Is it just whatever comes naturally or is there some method?
Hello Chabdi and welcome to the community.
Good questions.
Scale practice is rather mechanical and you will undoubtedly be playing as quarters or eighths with a Down Up Down Up picking movement … alternate picking.
When improvising, you really do want to try to break free of playing quarters or eighths. You want to liberate yourself from the mechanical and, frankly, boring sound of that monotonous pattern of notes. You need to express yourself. Some notes may be very short, others sustain for longer. Think of talking, some words are compressed and have punchy syllables, other are elongated with stretched vowels. You want to bring such expression to your improvisation. Which will mean you move away from the habit of only going Down and Up with your picking. You will develop a picking that suits your play and is efficient and effective for the notes you choose to hit.
Also, practicing scale patterns means you always play adjacent notes either one higher or one lower, depending on if you are ascending or descending the scale. When improvising, you will soon sound boring if you only ever play adjacent notes in a line. You want to think of jumping intervals, reaching to notes several up or several down from the current note. This may involve playing successive Down picks or successive Up picks.
I hope that helps.
Cheers
Richard
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For those seeking backing tracks, here are 50 free BTs I use:
Justin also has these products:
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Thank you for the very fast and detailed response Richard and for the post you linked. I will certainly be following those steps as I am keen to get into blues.
I understand these ideas that you say. Varying note lengths and intervals. And that improvisation is very different from scale playing. But Justin seems to be disregarding alternate picking even when playing adjacent notes and even ones on the same string. So is alternate picking only for scale practice and set songs while for improvisation it’s just free form and what comes naturally? Do rules like down picks for the beat go away? I guess the notes come so fast that there’s no way you can plan picking directions.
Sort of yes.
But practice the alternate picking technique until it is thoroughly embedded.
Then you can open out and transcend technique.
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The duration of the rests and the notes.
Don’t worry about it just now.
Follow the count 1, 2, 3, 4 and play by ear.
The TAB contains a mixture of quarter notes, eighth notes, triplets (quarter and eighth triplets), rests, hammer-ons, tied notes etc.
Much appreciated Richard.
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Thanks, and doing that as best as my ears will allow.
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“Easy” improvisation. This ain’t easy at all! I start out thinking, ‘OK im going to try a couple of different notes this time’, nothing complicated. Just two extra notes. So I start the bar, and I can even hear the new note I want to play in my head three notes before I get to it. I know it’s part of the scale. It’s going to sound so good. But then I get to the point of the new note, and I’ve no idea where it is, and have to pick around a bunch to find that note. It was below when I thought it was above. And by the time I find it, I’ve forgotten where I am in the bar and what the next segment is. By the time I’ve gone through it enough to find the note I’d been hearing, and play it smoothly in one go, it’s like I’ve just memorized a slightly different blues solo instead of freely and effortlessly improvising something. That’s not improvising, from my understanding.
I try to imagine this as fun but its really just frustrating. Going “up” the strings to the thick E strings to go “down” in tone is still really hard for my brain to accept. Working through a scale pattern alternating back and forth between frets is a lot different than going straight up or down a piano. And aside from all that, my picking hand can’t sense what string my fretting finger is headed to. So it’s all just wrong notes. I don’t know how I’ll ever get to be able to do all those things simultaneously unless it’s normal to take years and years. And years.
Rant over. Just had to get that out.
Hey Stacy,
Just keep pluggin away, and you will see improvement.
One exercise I’ve found very, very beneficial when learning new stuff, is to practice just over the root chord. If you’re able to, just loop an A7 chord, and play over just that. It allows you to hone in one the sound/ feel of the scale/ intervals without chasing chords.
Dont see this as a simplified way, or some sort of copout for not doing all the chords. Rather, i reckon its a smart way of approaching it; perhaps an essential way of really honing in on and focusing. And once you get better at with one chord, makes it much easier to do it with multilpe chords.
Whenever I’m aporoaching new stuff i’ll usually use these single chord progressions to start with.
Cheers, Shane
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Thanks, Shane. That’s a good suggestion and sounds doable. I’ll start doing it on my next practice.
I think I’ve noticed that only going up or down one note at a time in a short series sounds best, am I onto something there? In piano, I may stretch over many notes at a time in a melody, and it sounds amazing. But trying to jump to a note several notes away hasn’t worked out well here.
Are there any other little tips or tricks, other than what you just suggested and what Justin has outlined about phrasing and such, that will help demystify improvising? I can’t seem to find a way to determine where to fret next, other than to stay in the scale shape and not skip more than one note in the scale when making a phrase.
Hi there,
It would be so awesome to have a few backing tracks in the Justin Guitar App…I dont want to switch to guitar pro!
thanks all for this discussion and all the links. i didnt really get this lesson until i tried some of the backing tracks you have listed. SO much better. im sure im doing it v badly but it does at least feel like im noodling. like a guitarist might. fun.
lost the link. for me later, best/easiest to noodle over is: https://justinguitar.com/guitar-lessons/5-blues-licks-from-pattern-1-bl-404
coming back to this. i feel more lost. should i know licks to do this? or just makeup stuff. yes, my question is: when improvising do i just make stuff up ?