Do you ever find yourself getting tongue tied when you try to explain something to someone?<\/p>\n
Think about the last time you couldn’t find the right words when you were having a conversation…<\/p>\n
you might stutter, you may keep repeating yourself…<\/p>\n
you could say the wrong thing altogether…<\/p>\n
but finally (if you’re like me) you’ll throw your hands up in frustration and give up.<\/p>\n
Does that sound anything like your soloing at times?<\/p>\n
You stutter in the sense that you kind of randomly hit notes without really being sure of whether or not they are the right notes.<\/p>\n
You might find one little thing that does sound good so you repeat it over and over hoping some other little nugget will jump out (it rarely does, by the way.)<\/p>\n
And often times you really might just stop playing and let the band go on without you (I’ve done it too, it happens.)<\/p>\n
But this is where there’s a big difference between talking and playing – when you talk, you have a large vocabulary to draw from so if you can’t make your point one way, it’s possible you can try a different angle and still get the idea across.<\/p>\n
If you don’t have an idea you’re trying to get across when you solo, then there’s really no other option for you so it’s not going to go anywhere.<\/p>\n
And the single biggest thing that causes this is failing to really absorb a lick or phrase or idea.<\/p>\n
You can’t just learn the notes and call it a day… you have to know 3 important things about any lick or idea you’re going to play:<\/p>\n
You really have to put on your Sherlock Holmes hat and dig into your licks. And if you really want to dig into this sort of thing further check out my course, How To Improvise Blues Solos<\/a>, or this video about the 4 Qualities Of A Lick <\/a>(which is a big part of improvising…. see how that works?)<\/p>\n If you watch the way I break down a solo in 5 Easy Blues Solos<\/a> or Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a>, you’ll notice that I always give you those key pieces of information. That is not an accident and if you’ve let those things pass you by as you learned the lick, then you missed a big part and you’ll want to revisit those licks before you try to get too much further.<\/p>\n And in the future, take your time with each new idea.<\/p>\n I heard this saying that most people overestimate what they can do in a day but underestimate what they can do in a year. Apply that to your guitar playing and don’t worry about making giant steps today. Make small steps every day and watch them turn into giant leaps over the course of a few months or a year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do you ever find yourself getting tongue tied when you try to explain something to someone? Think about the last time you couldn’t find the right words when you were having a conversation… you might stutter, you may keep repeating yourself… you could say the wrong thing altogether… but finally (if you’re like me) you’ll […]<\/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":[10,27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6662"}],"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=6662"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7359,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6662\/revisions\/7359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}