Originally Posted by: William MGI am approaching the end of my 1st year as a student of this wonderful instrument. I think it was back in October I felt I was ready to begin moving in theory. Specifically I was looking at improvising.[/quote][p]Congrats on sticking with it!
[quote=William MG]I have tremendous respect for those among us who can take the same notes that I have on the fret board and make music out of them, while to me, they remain "notes and scales".
Kudos to you for recording yourself working on that blues! :) That's wonderful. 12 bar blues is a great framework to build your skills. Short, repetitious form, predicable chord changes on the most solid harmonic progression I-IV-V.
You are still in the stage of automating those chord changes. You've got a few licks under your fingers, which is great. You can physically play the notes in time!
The lick you are working with in the video is fine. But it's a little odd for beginner routine because it starts on the 4th scale degree. At your stage I encourage students to do licks that explicitly & abundantly focus on chord tones.
First I have them work on this tutorial. It's for building basic physical & timing skills. Super simple blues lick that sounds good all the time. You can work on your physical coordination & work on playing it in time with the music.
https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=723
You can probably work through that one pretty quickly! The next step is to target chord tones by changing the lick for the sole purpose of outlining the chord changes. This lick is built so that you always start the same way, but end the lick with last note explicitly landing on the root of the chord that is happening at that point in the form: I, IV or V.
https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=2337
Once you can do that on a regular basis then it becomes so much easier to anticipate the changes rather than worrying about if you might get lost. Make sense?
After that you can start to move the pattern around the fretboard. This is great practice at shifting positions while still targeting chord tones. And you are following the chord changes the whole time!
https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=2345
See if those help! And keep going. You are doing great. :)
