Welcome back to Mel Bay's Guitar Sessions webzine! I hope you've enjoyed the lessons of the past two months. We've been looking at soloing using arpeggios and chord-inversion shapes as an outline. If you've worked through the past lessons, you know a couple of shapes for a 4-chord that can be found near a straight-bar 1-chord. We'll continue this month in the Key of C with a common blues progression, and this time we'll add more ideas to our concept of finding compatible notes and improvising with them.

First off, here's an important concept for soloing: you don't have to go from note to note constantly. For some reason, especially in bluegrass, players get the idea that good solos go to a different note at every possible moment. The result is that you too often hear a barrage of notes with no clear melody or discernable phrasing.

A clear example of the effectiveness of playing the same note or phrase more than once can be found in blues lead guitar. Next time you listen to BB King, notice how he continually works over the same note or small pocket of notes while the band plays energetic rhythm and chord changes behind him. Because of the repetition, a couple of things occur: 1.) Listeners can easily follow what King is doing, and 2.) when he varies from the pattern or takes the melody to a new note, it really means something to the listener.

In addition, by staying on the same note over a chord change, the note takes on a different relationship to the chord progression. An example on Dobro would be to play the 1st string/5th fret (G note) over a C-F7-C-G7-C progression. The G is a 5-note of the C chord, a 9-note of the F7 chord, and a 1-note of the G7 chord. You'd be amazed how much excitement you can build in a solo by letting the band do the work while you play the same note!

By establishing a pattern-a distinct phrase with melodic and/or rhythmic repetition-you create the expectations in the listener that you'll do the same thing again. Each time you subtly change what you're doing, the listener hears the change while simultaneously expecting something else. These are some of the musical moments that will truly engage your audience. Remember, that most of your audience can't follow a maelstrom of notes, but anyone can follow a simple, clearly expressed musical idea.

You have to use your ear (or your knowledge of scales and chords) to know whether a given note will work over certain chords in a progression, but if you experiment, you'll find many situations where staying on a note or repeating a phrase over a chord change will sound especially good.

Remember, the individual notes of a chord will sound good as that chord is being played. In fact, these chord tones will almost always be the most important melody notes of the song. Here's a concept that builds on this simple idea:

If you have found an arpeggio or a section of a scale that sounds good over a given chord, in many cases (depending on the feel of the song), it will sound good if you lead into any of those notes from a semitone below (and often from a semitone above). You can't generally stay on that leading tone for very long, but if it's done quickly, you can add some interest to your melody line by playing the note that's a fret below the ensuing chord tone or scale note.

The following short Tab will help you understand this concept. First, here's a melody that uses the F arpeggio we identified in a previous lesson along with some open strings:

Now here's a similar melody that adds notes a semitone below most of the chord tones.

In the following Tab, you'll see several examples where a phrase is repeated by transposing for a subsequent chord or moving it up an octave. Elsewhere, the exact same note is repeated several times. Within the Tab I've included an explanation of what's happening throughout to help clarify where each technique is being used.

Once you've learned the fret positions for the above Tab, pay extra attention to your intonation. Also, try to move from string to string as smoothly as possible without extraneous string noise. When you have the barring aspect of the Tab down, have a look at your picking. Are you alternating thumb and index or thumb and middle when consecutive notes are played on the same string? Doing so will improve your speed and timing.

After you can play this Tab comfortably, take a tune you know-preferably a bluesy or modal one-and try to incorporate some of these ideas into your arrangement. Good luck with your new slide techniques!

Until next month,
Ivan Rosenberg

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