Learning how to improvise on the guitar is an essential skill for taking your playing into the world of live and collaborative music. For many beginner musicians, it can be one of the most daunting hurdles to overcome. But it doesn’t have to be. Like most musical skills, the key is consistent practice, both alone AND with others. Here are a few tips to guide your playing.
Learn your scales
Scales are the building blocks of your improvisational repertoire, and you should know them by feel. Play until your fingers know the shapes, and you can play them without thinking.
Start with your major and minor pentatonics, and the blues scale. Learn them in multiple positions and at different places on the neck. Then move on to your modes, and harmonic minor. Once you have these down you can start playing with more exotic and genre-specific scales.
Know which scales fit in which keys and over what chords
It goes without saying that not every scale fits in every key. Know which ones apply and when. This requires a little music theory knowledge but it’s really not as scary as it seems. Knowing a few simple relationships will get you most of the way there.
Shuffle your patterns
Improv is all about patterns, but no one wants to hear you play the major scale straight from top to bottom. Instead, you want to be able to take fragments and rearrange them.
Play your scale in thirds, fourths, or fifths. Play up two, down one. Learn your triad and seventh chord arpeggios. Mix up where you shift your fretting hand position. There are literally millions of ways to play the major scale. You can’t learn them all, but each one you do learn is a tool in your toolbox.
Play to a track
The best way to get better at improvising is to improvise. Cue up your favorite song, and jam out. It doesn’t have to be great. The point is to learn what works and what doesn’t, and develop your own style. Don’t do it the way the guitarist on the track does it. Add something new. What do YOU have to say. How does the track make YOU feel and can you express that feeling through your instrument?
Play with other musicians
Practice by yourself is important to develop your skills, but at the end of the day, improvisation is a team sport. The whole point of a jam is to create something dynamic together, and you can only do this if you are playing with other people in real time.
Listen!
Along those same lines, make sure you’re listening to the other musicians you are playing with. The goal is communication. You want to respond to the ideas others are sharing through their instruments, and have them respond to yours. Playing music is all about collaboration, and never is this more true than when improvising.
Sing what you’re playing as you play it
This may seem like an odd suggestion, and it’s probably not something you want to do in a performance. But as a practice tool it can be invaluable. The goal of improvisation is to be able to make the things you hear in your head come out on your guitar in real time.
At first, you will probably not be very good at this. Even once you’ve learned scales backward and forward, your improvisation will mostly consist of notes chosen more or less randomly from the set you are working with. But over time, you can develop the skills of playing what you hear. And as weird as it sounds, singing what you’re playing as you’re playing it can force your brain and your fingers to collaborate.
Take risks when you’re not on stage, play to your strengths when you are
In some ways, improvising is an empty canvas for you to go wild on. And during your personal practice time, you should take advantage of this. Push your boundaries, be uncomfortable. Don’t be afraid to fail. This will only make you better in the long run, even if it leads to some cringe-worthy moments. Failure is part of getting better.
When you’re onstage though, you should reel it in a little. This doesn’t mean you have to always play it safe and predictable, but staying in space where you feel comfortable and confident puts your best foot forward and serves the ensemble you’re playing with. By being risky in your practice time you can gradually expand your comfort zone, and soon the sounds that used to be only for experimentation may become part of your regular repertoire.
Learning how to improvise on the guitar is a must if you want to be a successful live musician. While it does take practice and dedication, the skills are quite achievable if you put in the work. With these simple guidelines, you will be on your way to quality jams in no time.
Ben Rubin