How do people jam with one another and solo non stop

Question

Ok so I just finished my blues guitar lesson for today. My teacher played the song and asked me to ` just solo anything' along with the song. He gave me parts of a scale and I am alone to 'solo anything'. He left me alone in the studio so as to provide some privacy for me to 'solo' freely without feeling pressurised. I stared at my fretboard and other than going intervals up and down the given scale I don't sound like I am really soloing on my own. 30 min passed and I am still lost. I asked my teacher who popped by to take a look and he just said, ' yes anything, just solo don't be afraid'.. I managed to stay on abit longer after another unproductive 10 min and decided to leave the studio, feeling totally disgusted at myself. I'd wish to jam with the others and freely solo at a basic level. But it just seem so difficult. 12 bar blues yea I got it. Oh, learning a blues standards note by note, yea, I can totally manage it. But how do people who jam a blues song stand together and the guitarist of the group start soloing happily and endlessly and so addictively ? I am referring to some kids of the same music school who are younger than me and also still learning.

Answer 1

Improvisation is using, combining and varying previously learned phrases and ideas from your musical vocabulary.

A musical vocabulary is an essential requirement to improvisation, and you don't have it. You must build a musical vocabulary in order to say things musically. This is learned through playing by ear, listening and repeating. You are told to "say something", but you are unable to speak. You try to speak, but only basic letters come out. A, B, C, D... meaningless sounds. What's wrong with this guy, I want to hear what he has to say and he starts mumbling the alphabet? A scale is an alphabet. When teaching someone to speak English, you start by using words and sentences, not letters of the alphabet. And not just speaking, by actually using the words and sentences. "Hello, my name is Jack." You don't usually say "Jack" if it's not actually your name.

Your music teacher didn't try to teach you to use words and sentences, he told you to "say something" - a huge leap for someone who cannot even use words yet. What kind of a teacher is that? Not a very good one, IMO. Maybe he's just inexperienced, or maybe it never occurred to him that he could try teaching the required basic skills. Maybe in the past his students have somehow obtained the skills from somewhere else, or quit.

• Don't play memorized note sequences, play by ear. Listen and repeat. Repeat the rhythm. Repeat the harmony.
• Don't play scales, play phrases. Scales are meaningless, they are not even words. You can use scales for reference, to reason about the things you say musically. It can be good to know that the phrase you can say, starts from such and such note. Scales give you a "what and where" reference grid, but they don't give you phrases.

Listen to a rhythmic idea and repeat it on your instrument. Take one bar of a melody and repeat it by ear on your instrument. Keep trying until you succeed.

Learn to play backing chords by ear. When you learn that, you gain the ability to know what others are playing. Listen to a song and try to repeat its chord harmony on your instrument. Keep trying until you succeed.

Listen to a melody of a song you can play chords to, by ear, and repeat it on your instrument. See what the chord tones are, and then see what the melody notes are relative to the chord tones.

This takes time and effort. There is no trick, no secret to know, there is only trial and error. Listen and repeat. Keep trying until you succeed.

When you can use a phrase, you start playing variations of the phrase. Like with English, if you know a phrase "I'd like to have a cup of coffee", you can make a clever variation of it: "I'd like to have a very large cup of coffee, please". In music, you can change a pitch here and a rhythm there, or you play the phrase in a different place. Cut the phrase in half and combine it with another phrase. You play a different phrase in a surprising place. You change and combine things. Improvisation is using, combining and varying previously learned phrases and ideas from your musical vocabulary.

Answer 2

A good improviser doesn't even need the backing track for listeners to know where they are! They will have a tendency to hit right notes at the right time, to start with.

How does that happen? By knowing (at your stage) where beat 1 in a bar is, and which chord is being played in that particular bar. A simple test for this, using 12 bar blues as your example, simply play the root note to last for each bar in question. 4 bars of A at the beginning will need 4 A notes, nothing more. 2 bars of D next - 2 D notes, and so on.

Not exactly a solo yet - but the bare bones of one, believe me. It's mapping out the chord sequence as it goes.

Of course, most good players will have moved on somewhat from that, but it's a great start.

Keep those notes in, for the next step, and add others in between - any from the 'scale' will do. As long as you arrive at the next 'stepping stone' in time. Don't always play the next scale note up or down, jumps of less than an octave are quite acceptable.

Bear in mind two other things that constitute good solos: note lengths and dynamics. Play a few short notes, then a long one - appropriate of course to the presiding bar! Make some quieter, some louder.

And wonder all the time why your teacher has simply left you in a vacuum to your own devices...