Create your own expressive blues solos from scratch using a simple three-step method! In this two-hour workshop you'll learn how to:

  • Combine blues, swing and jazz licks on the blues in E
  • Use form, phrasing and contrast to play without tab
  • make every lick feel like it's part of a greater whole
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Practicing Improvisation?

Improvisation goes hand in hand with playing the blues. And yet so much fingerstyle guitar instruction focuses on learning classic repertoire  and other tab  note-for-note. As a result, you may find yourself limited to reproducing the same handful of memorized pieces over and over, or tied to the tab on the page, with no way to just sit down and play music off the top of your head.

Alternatively, the resources that do promise to teach improvising tend to either overwhelm you with the sheer amount of scales, arpeggios and other tools you "need" to learn, or remain extremely vague about how to turn all that information into anything you can actually use in an accessible, musical way.

I've spent a lot of time observing how blues and jazz musicians improvise, and worked to distill what I've learned about how people really play into a handful of simple, practical ideas. In this workshop, I'll walk you through a three-step process for soloing on the blues that you can reliably use over and over to create an infinite succession of coherent, expressive and satisfying twelve-bar choruses.

We'll start with the form of the blues, and how to find the right places for your licks to land. Next, we'll look at phrasing – the rhythmic shape of the licks you play – and how with just four kinds of phrases you can make sure all your lines hang together and make musical sense. Finally, yes, we'll talk about scales – the blues scale, major pentatonic scale, swing scale and diminished scale – but we'll do everything in open position, and see how to use phrasing and contrast to get the most music out of the fewest notes.

It's easy to feel like improvisation is some kind of voodoo you either can or can't do. But having gradually worked out how to improvise while playing fingerstyle blues myself, I'm here to tell you it's not only something you can learn, it's something you can consciously practice and get better at. "Practicing improvisation" may sound like an oxymoron, but that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do in this workshop. And when we're done, you'll know just what to work on and how to work on it to build your soloing skills, develop your ideas and always have something to play when you sit down to pick the blues.

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Form, Phrasing and Contrast – How To Create Great Solos From Scratch

Like a lot of beginning guitar players, I first saw the acoustic guitar as something to bide my time with until I could get my hands on an electric instrument – preferably one of those pre-CBS three-tone sunburst Stratocasters everybody in The Last Waltz seemed to favor, thank you very much. And it seemed beyond obvious that the point of playing electric blues, on such a Stratocaster or otherwise, was to solo – to sound like B.B. King at the Regal Theatre, or Duane Allman at the Fillmore, or Buddy Guy at Chess Records in 1967. You know – to improvise. And I know was not alone. When I found a copy of Mississippi John Hurt – Today! at the public library and played it for my best friend, his first reaction was "...yeah, but – does he play any blues licks?"

And there's the disconnect, right there: electric blues players solo. Acoustic blues players...play. My budding fingerstyle repertoire consisted of pieces – ragtime tunes from the Richard Saslow book, songs and instrumentals painstakingly scraped off of LPs by Dave Van Ronk, Taj Mahal, Hot Tuna and others. Each tune was a window into more things you could do, but once learned, I played them the same way every time, and that was that. Soloing was something to do with other people, on an electric guitar.

But around the same time, I saw a distant relative sit down at the piano and play the blues all by himself. He was keeping a rolling bass going, running through the same chord progression I knew, but improvising over it at the same time. That, I immediately realized, was what I wanted to be able to do on guitar: play by myself, but solo like I was in a band.

If that's something you want to be able to do, there are three things you'll need. First, you need a way to tame all that wide open space. The prospect of filling  up twelve or twenty-four bars at a time on the sheer strength of your imagination can be daunting. Next, you need a way to give each lick a destination – "and now, we're going to land...here." And finally, you need a way to create contrast – the sense of drama that comes from mixing brighter sounds like the major pentatonic scale with darker ones like the blues scale.

So the first step is to look at the blues chord progression as a form. By divvying up the blues the way a blues lyric does, we immediately go from having twelve bars to fill, to three four-bar lines. Much more manageable. And within each of those lines, there are two essential landing points, places where the music wants to resolve. So next, we can pay attention to our phrasing, taking advantage of those landing points by choosing rhythms that lead into those landing points rather than leading away from them. And then, choosing the actual notes to play – which scales to work from and what notes from them to emphasize – is now a matter of deciding what colors we want to hear, and when. Something bluesier, something brighter, something that reflects a particular chord in the underlying progression?

Working line by line through the blues with four essential kinds of phrases, we can develop a rhythmic template for our solos that removes just enough guesswork about where to play while leaving plenty of room for thinking creatively and expressively about what to play. As we go through the workshop applying both downhome blues licks and uptown swing and jazz moves to the twelve-bar progression, you'll build your vocabulary while putting the blues and major pentatonic scales, the swing scale and the diminished sound into action.

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Why a live workshop? How does it work?

I've been doing in depth live streams for over a year as part of my monthly membership, The Fingerstyle Five, and on my Youtube channel. Since last month's Chord Substitutions workshop, I've had numerous requests for a similar workshop on Improvisation. The live stream format combines a concentrated amount of material on a specific topic with an interactive, Q&A environment that lets you get your specific questions answered while the workshop is still going on. Before this workshop starts, you'll have a PDF with notation and tab of each example I'm going to teach, so you can focus on watching and learning, knowing the note-for-note specifics are already in your hands. The whole two hours will be archived for later replay, so you'll be able to watch anything you want again for the next three months. And I'll pause at regular intervals to take questions via chat, to clear up aspects of the material that are still unclear.

Join The Interactive Live Stream This Saturday

Improvisation: How To Create Great Solos From Scratch is a two-hour live-online workshop being streamed this Saturday, December 12th at 10:30AM CST. Registration is $47 and the workshop will include:

  • Two hours of live-streamed online instruction
  • Downloadable notation and tab of all twelve exercises
  • Live chat – ask David your questions as we work through the material
  • Access to re-watch the archived live stream for the next three months
Click Here To Register

Can't attend live on December 12th? Yes, you can still register for the replay!

I got so many requests for this last time that I'm making it official up front: If you're not free this Saturday but still want access to the material, you can register just the same as you would to attend live, and watch the replay afterwards. You'll get the same PDFs, and the same three-month replay window, you just won't be able to ask questions in the live chat. Simply register below like you were going to attend, and watch at your own pace once you have the time.

Register for the workshop now!

Use this form to sign up.