Do you want to just take your guitar and play any song you desire? I can tell you how great this feels, when you have the ability to simply think about songs and play them on demand. In this article I explain how to improvise on guitar in 5 easy steps.
Do you ever worry that you’ll not find the right notes, or that you don’t even have the talent to play certain songs?
Well, that is something that happens to a lot of people, but it doesn’t have to be like this. You don’t need to worry about playing the right notes if you use guitar improvisation techniques that will help you playing anything you want on the guitar.
That’s why I encourage anyone who wants to play any song to learn the principles of improvisation on guitar. I cover these and some other topics in my free 60 pages PDF course. You can get it by email clicking here.
Here are 6 easy steps that you can use to develop your improvisation skills.
1. Start with simple chords
The easiest way to start with improvisation is to use the chords as the starting point.
For example, if you’re playing a C major chord, you have already four notes to play with: C, E, G, and B. You can start playing these notes in different combinations and speeds.
2. Play with simple chord sequences
As a next step, you can now repeat the same for other chords. For example, in a sequence 4,5,1 with chords F, G, and C, you can play the notes in the F chord (F,A,C), G chord (G,B,D), and C chord (C,E,G).
Start slowly and be sure to play these notes in locations as different as possible. Use these notes and employ them to get the maximum variation in each position.
3. Add other notes to Improvise on Guitar
Once you get familiar with the main notes of each chord, you can start adding other nodes to give some color to your improvisation.
For example, if you’re in a C chord, you can start adding notes like A, D, and B. These notes will give color to your performance, and will expand the possibilities.
4. Play over well known songs
The next step is to play the notes you’ve practiced in previous steps by now in a real song. In the beginning you can start with slow songs, with easy chords. This is essential if you want to learn how to improvise on guitar.
The goal is to play along with the song, but doing your improvisation. You’ll use the chord notes, but also the additional notes, and make sure that it sounds as a good improvisation.
This will be difficult at the beginning, but as you do this day after day, you’ll start noticing what works and what doesn’t. This will give your additional ideas of how to create nice improvisations over the songs that you’re playing with.
5. Expand the notes you play
The next step is not to expand your possibilities. First, play with more complex songs and faster songs. This will teach you to create improvisations on songs that change chords frequently.
Another thing you can do is to use chromatic notes, that is, notes that are not in the main scale of the chord. This will give you much more freedom to play what comes to your mind. In the end, the goal of learning to improvise is to have total freedom to chose what you want to play.
6. Play Songs Faster
Using improvisation techniques, you can play any song faster. That’s because you’ll have trained yourself to perform any improvisation you want with little effort. As a result, you’ll also be able to play riffs and songs faster than ever.
Learn More About Guitar Improvisation
If you want to learn to play the guitar from the very beginning, with a solid foundation, a great start point is to get the FREE PDF that I created with all you need to learn about the guitar. You can receive freely by email by clicking here.