Ok, so it’s a while since I posted on this blog, and the last entry was a bit messy (at least it was for me).
Anyway, despite being mad busy with getting final-year Uni work finished I found a couple of minutes to pick up the guitar the other day, and decided to have a little mess with getting some lick ideas out of a scale. If I’ve not mentioned this before, this is something I usually struggle with – firstly to find ideas that don’t sound scalic, and secondly to find more than one idea from the same scale without each sounding very alike (I tend to concentrate on one area of the fretboard at a time, so this is quite common).
On this particular occasion, I came up with a couple of ideas which sounded good (just over a single-chord vamp) and after another go at trying to expand on these ideas I now have a total of 6 licks which I think are pretty decent, at least as a starting point.
When coming up with these ideas, my internal mental process was a mixture of things I’d absorbed from books/DVDs/lessons, and a certain amount of messing about or just trying this or that. So, I thought it might be useful to dissect these ideas, and analyse them to see what I’ve absorbed into my approach, and if there are any patterns in the subconscious/haphazard part of the approach which I can document and use consciously next time I try to do the same thing.
The idea here isn’t to memorise the licks themselves, nor to squeeze every drop of creativity out of the process by writing it down, but just to become aware of the ways in which I can string notes together to make them sound less….strung together, I suppose.
The main idea which prompted me to give this exercise another go was to visualize the chord shape (in this case an Emaj7) within the relevant scale. As long as you’re reasonably familiar with the chord tones and their function within the chord shape, then it gives you quite a few reference points for building the scale (I always find it easier to think in chords than scales). My aim then was to use the chord shape as a framework to weave in and out of, using the other scale tones to do so.
Anyway, videos will follow tomorrow along with some hopefully useful observations.
