good ole improv

[~<K-boY>~]

ok. ppl. i need some help in here.
i have been on this site 4 ages and learned alot. thanx Shawn. but i still have a problem. i learned bout pentas and major scales and licks. what's the next step in improvising? any advices? is it a good start to create ur own licks or learn other cool guitarists' licks and solos first?

[cyberfret]

You want to both write and experiment with your own ideas, and learn some licks and ideas from other guitar players. If you went through the improv lessons here at Cyberfret.com, one of the ideas that you learned about was targeting. That is going to be an important idea in improvisation. In the one targeting lesson, I talked about playing the 2 notes above, and the 2 notes below, before resolving to the root of the scale.

Here is the targeting lesson.
http://www.cyberfret.com/improvisation/targeting/index.htm

Of course resolving a phrase to the root of the scale is not something that you want to do all of the time. The notes that you resolve to at anyone moment will depend on what chord is being played. So as a started, think of the notes that you want to resolve to, or hold for a longer period of time will be chord tones. You can "target" those chord tones.

Improvisation is probably the biggest subject that you can dive into. It takes a knowledge of theory and chord construction.....and knowledge of scales and arpeggios. But what I would suggest doing, as a next step is to start to incorporate the notes of the chords in your improv. At first that is a matter of just finding a couple of key tones that you know are in the chord. If you are using pentatonic scales, some of those chord tones will fall outside the scale. So that alone will help give some spice to a mostly pentatonic lick.

Check out the following lessons on arpeggios. An arpeggios is just the notes of a chord played one at a time.

Major arpeggios
http://www.cyberfret.com/arpeggios/basic/major/index.php

Minor arpeggios
http://www.cyberfret.com/arpeggios/basic/minor/index.php

--Shawn