Improvisation

[forgottenking2]

John Petrucci always said (I think I heard this from Andy Aledort too) "Listen for silence" and "The song comes first" I thnik that's a cool approach, I mean, we all musicians... specially guitarists have fairly big (for not to say Huge) egos, and (at least in the beginning of our musical life) think of a song as a way to show off our technical skills and mastery of the instrument... showing off it's not at all wrong... I still remember playing The forgotten 1 and 2 and then the bells of lal in one set and feeling like the king of the world (ok, maybe it IS a little wrong ) but what's really bad is when you sacrifice the song to feature your skills... A friend of mine who's an awesome performer (in fact he was my very first influence and motivation), when he was first performing live, played Aerosmith's "Dream On" and he would literally play a blizard of notes everytime the singer would rest (inbetween lines!!!!) to the point that it got just anoying... guitar oriented people could appreciate his technique, but the general audience though "he just sucked"; luckily he recognized his fault and started playing more "song oriented" and now he's a great guitarist. (you know who I'm talking about H. C.)... so the bottom line of this blahberish (is that really a word??? ) is listen for silence, in some musical situations "silence is golden" still.

Regards,

[UltimaRage]

Just about a week ago, I just sat there on the ground, in my room, in front of my amp, with my guitar in hand, and just let it flow. It was really cool.... whatever I heard in my head, came out of my guitar. I know how to control this ability now, and I like it much better than scale improvisation since it gives you more head-room while improvising, more freedom. Steve Vai also says that you shouldn't be tied down by scales. They can be helpful, though, at times. Sometimes, you should just let it flow.

[szulc]

How complex are the chord changes you are improvising over?
If you are talking about a 1 chord vamp then that is pretty easy and unless you have some cool ideas can get very boring to listen to.

In general the more complex the chord progression the more thinking I find myself doing.