Learning Through Improvisation
As someone that teaches and plays jazz guitar, I often take it for granted that everyone uses soloing and improvisation to learn different harmonic, melodic and technical aspects of the guitar, but this isn’t always the case.
Because not all of us have learned through improvisation when studying the guitar, I have put together three of my favorite ways to incorporate improvisation into my guitar practice routine.
Below are three of my favorite ways to mix improv and technical/musical elements in my routine, check them out and see what you think.
3 Improvisational Exercises For Guitar
To help get you started with this concept, here are three exercises that I like to use in my teaching and practicing in order to bring a level of improvisation to my technical learning and woodshedding.
Learning Scales By Soloing
In this exercise, I take any scale that I am working on in the practice room, and once I can play it up and down smoothly from memory, I put on a backing track and solo over the underlying chord(s) using only that scale to build my solo.
This not only gets the scale shape under my fingers, but I am learning to hear this scale against a harmonic progression, as well as learning to solo with the scale at the same time.
After I have worked the scale in this way over one chord/key, I would then repeat the exercise in all 12 keys.
Learning Slurs by Soloing
Here, I pick a certain slur such as a hammer-on, pull-off or slide, and I pick a chord progression to solo over using that particular slur as much as I can, while trying to keep things musical at the same time.
Sometimes we think that we can only learn technical ideas such as slurs by running them up and down scales or finger patterns, but this isn’t always the case.
Often, soloing with these technical items can help us learn to play different slurs in a real-world situation, soloing, which prepares us to use them on the bandstand or in a jam situation with our mates.
Ear Training With Soloing
To work on my aural skills in the practice room, one of the exercises I use is to solo over chord progressions with my voice only.
To do this, I pick out a chord or chord progression I want to work on, then I play those chords on the guitar and practice singing a solo over top of that harmony.
I can do this was as little or as much freedom as I want to bring to the exercise.
For example, I could freely solo using any note I wanted to over top of that harmony. Or, I could focus on a group of notes such as only using the related Minor Pentatonic Scale, related Major Scale or related Arpeggio.
Regardless of which way you go, singing over top of chords, in tune and time, is a great way to connect your ears to your fingers, raising your aural skill levels at the same time as you work on improvisation at the same time.
What do you think of these 3 exercises? Share your thoughts or comments in the thread below.
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The Professor Learning With Improvisation Jul 23 2013, 03:39 PM
