So how do you decide where to start?<\/p>\n
It’s my experience with students that they usually start exactly – nowhere. They tend to stare at me for several bars until they finally give up.<\/p>\n
That is, until I tell them something like “OK, you have to play only the top 3 strings in box 2.”<\/p>\n
That’s when I get some music because there is a specific direction.<\/p>\n
So let’s say you have some jam tracks<\/a> and you’re going to practice your blues soloing a little bit… let me make a suggestion.<\/p>\n Choose an area of the fretboard that you are going to work with today… or at least right now for 15-20 minutes.<\/p>\n Maybe it’s an area that you aren’t so good with – when was the last time you limited yourself to box 3, for example?<\/p>\n Or maybe you’re going to take one of your favorite licks from box 1, and move it to box 4 and see if you can still play the same notes but in a different place?<\/p>\n Or maybe you have to stay between the 12th and 15th fret and only on the top 3 strings and play in the key of C, can you do it?<\/p>\n If you just stop and think for a minute you could probably come up with a dozen “limits” to impose on yourself – all of which will get you out of the “box 1 zone” and into moving more comfortably around the fretboard because you have learned it piece by piece.<\/p>\n So when you practice today, give yourself a limit and see what comes out… and if you like the results, leave a comment with how you limited yourself so everyone else can see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I often say there is freedom in limits… which seems like kind of a contradiction in terms but let me explain. You’re about to take a solo and you know all 5 boxes of the blues scale\u00a0so you figure you can play any of them at any time, right? So how do you decide where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6331"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6332,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6331\/revisions\/6332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/SWS-product-shot-340x340.jpg\")
<\/a>By the way, one of the best courses I’ve ever done on this concept is called Soloing Without Scales<\/a>… you might want to check it out<\/a>. I call it my “sleeper course” because I hardly ever mention it but I get great feedback on it from those that go through it.<\/p>\n