After a period of not feeling too great about my playing, I found myself working with a few backing tracks that were pretty inspiring.

My approach with these lately has been to look at the chords being played and experiment with some "out of the box" notes...the box being the pentatonic scale which is home base for me.

I did this a few weeks ago, so I don't even remember the key let alone what scales I used :).

A technique I used here that worked really well was to control my tone with my volume knob. For the mellow clean section, I rolled my volume down to where it wasn't breaking up. When the backing track kicked into gear, I turned my volume know all of the way up. I did this while sustaining a note which I thought had a cool impact.

A backing track like this it almost feels like cheating...you can just go along for the ride!

I'm a huge fan of the band Porcupine Tree, and this track reminded me of their song Russia on Ice. Unconciously I was imitating some of that song without realizing it.

Hope you enjoy listening to it.

https://soundcloud.com/ballistic_squid/spiritual-aeolian-squid