A Drill To Help With Improvising Options

[Guitar1969]

I read this somewhere on the net and thought it was an interesting approach to improvising:

"This is a trick that Steve Vai uses that I read about when I was a kid, and it almost works too well. What you do is pick two notes, generally next to each other but they can really be anything. Take those two notes and play only those notes for as long as you can. You can do absolutely anything that you want with them. Bends, sliding up, sliding down, hammer-ons, pull-offs, tremolo picking, etc. Make a good attempt every now and then to play those 2 notes for at least a half hour. I'm not going to paint a pretty picture. At first it is interesting and you come up with lots of ideas for those 2 notes, but after about 5 minutes, you start to lose your mind. However, if you stick with it, you will very soon realize that there is a whole plethora of concepts and ideas out there.

The important thing about this exercise is that when you finally give yourself a break, your hands go crazy. Its like they've been cooped up in a prison cell for 6 years and are now being set free. The ideas will flow to you so quickly that your mind can barely keep up. I will also say, that this method of training no doubt works best if you are pretty relaxed when it comes to improvising on the guitar."

I am going to give this a try tonight and see how it goes.

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