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You may very well share the same dream of many aspiring guitar players – to be able to sit down with a guitar and play something, by yourself, that sounds like music.<\/p>\nYou may very well share the same dream of many aspiring guitar players – to be able to sit down with a guitar and play something, by yourself, that sounds like music.<\/p>\n
And you may have noticed that strumming some chords doesn’t really make a song (though it’s an extremely important skill)…<\/p>\n
Likewise you may have noticed that hitting a couple of cool licks doesn’t make a song (though, again, it’s a great skill to have.)<\/p>\n
But imagine if you could just sit down and play something when someone says, “Oh, you play guitar? Play me something.”<\/p>\n
Strumming the chords to “Brown Eyed Girl” isn’t going to sound like much… much like playing the solo to “Texas Flood” isn’t going to sound like much.<\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong, those things are awesome and take time and practice and are not things to be abandoned.<\/p>\n
But when you’re playing and you just want to “play something” it’s going to need to have all the elements of a song:<\/p>\n
1. Rhythm – everything has to have rhythm because that’s where you hang the notes and without it everything will sound random to your listener (because it is random \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
2. Harmony – chords need to change (most of the time) or it gets stale pretty fast.<\/p>\n
3. Melody – when was the last time you hummed a chord progression? It won’t happen so you’ve got to give folks something they can latch on to and that’s where melody comes in.<\/p>\n
So strumming the chords to “Brown Eyed Girl” has harmony (chords change,) and if you do it right it’ll have some rhythm because of your strumming… but no melody.<\/p>\n
Playing a bunch of sweet licks will have some melody (single notes) but no harmony and not a lot of rhythm unless you’re really on it.<\/p>\n
I made this video<\/a> with a little more in depth look at the 3 elements and a couple of quick ideas on how you can start to actually put them together.<\/p>\n If you have Acoustic Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a>, pretty much all of those elements are covered in great detail and even put together for you. If you’re an electric guy,\u00a0in Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a>\u00a0check out the Playing On The Porch lessons (they are near the end, but you can do them fairly easily if you’ve done some of the others.)<\/p>\n