jawdrop..the knowledge of where you are in the fret board and those transitions you make on what it is you want to play next is something i want to fully grasp.. well you are out of this world so i might just get a fraction of it someday
Thanks for the videos rick. Just listened to your previous improvisation video from a couple years back and found incredibly useful tidbits of information to incorporate into my playing. Was entirely stoked when I saw you just recently upload another video on this concept! Can't thank you enough for your videos (aside from possibly setting money aside to grab a few of your online lessons!)
this is the vid i've been waiting on for about 2 or so years. i'd love to learn more about what goes on in your head while you're playing. chops is one thing, but how to make them musical while improvising is a whole 'nother basket of cats. thanks so much for this one - learned a lot - looking forward to more of these.
love the fact your videos come out when i only have an hour or so left at work! gets me so pumped to get home and play and makes the last couple of hours slightly less shit :D
Glad that you acknowledged that a lot of videos online and cherry picked - not as a weakness but I think the illusion is that everything put out there is one take.
A sort of improvisation I tend to do is over the top of an already existing song, I go into it without knowing what kind of lead I am going to play over the song and is on the spot improvisation. How I do it to where the end result sounds good is by figuring out the melody the singer is performing where you force the guitar to say the words the singer is saying with the pitch being identical. Doing this gives me a list of notes I can stop on and sustain a whole note, doing this allows me to alter those notes on an octave level and position them in my head on the finger board to take advantage of the entire fret board. Finally I will find out the chord progression so I know where to go next with it. Although it is a highly analytical way of looking at the song I still do not know the scale runs, technique and positions I will use and results in it being different every time I do it. That is the improvised portion of it. The final way I do it for a rhythm is to simply strum once a chord and look for a chord that sounds good to go to next. I will then improvise a strumming pattern with the chords I picked at random. I will also look for odd finger picking patterns that sound unique that I don't see often if at all. The finger picking can either be used as a rhythm or a lead due to my knack of voicing a tonally high string and sort of pick a serious of notes while playing bass notes providing a melody in the same manner as someone sings words. It causes what I consider a rhythm section to sound fuller than just strumming or picking.
Hi Rick I love your guitar playing you have inspired me and actually taught me some new things to improve my guitar soloing playing, I would love to hear your approach to blues style with your style of playing rather than scales which I can hear moving with the chords, just a thought because I believe you have incredible ability you should be more famous you're as good as the best I think, but as you know, a unique style makes players stand out from the rest, good luck keep up the good work I'll keep watching and learning. 😎
Brilliant lesson. I had one question, after learning major and minor scales and the diatonic modes, what is next step? Fir example you used melodic minor, how did you decide where to use it? By ear or by some theory? Thanks
I have Chord Chemistry- honestly it doesn't do much for me- it's good with voice-leading- but not chord progressions per se unless you just plain love jazz- which I don't.
@@yjmsrv Leon White Chord Systems, now there's a new book by someone who has transcribed lots of Ted's stuff.. now he made it into a logical method - with chord progressions. Enjoy
That's really good material, there is not so much information of that way of view improvisation , you should do more videos about this theorical-approach of improvisation!
man I love the color and finish of this tele! Somehow at the beginning I saw it wasnt a Fender (I tink lol).. I wanna know what guitar brand this is! (if it isnt Fender) thanks!
You are just amazing. A unique experience man. I wish I was a fly on your ceiling on a day you would infinitely improvise...and I haven't said that to a woman.Ever.Not even my wife.And I'm straight...
Also I was wondering if you've ever studied John Coltrane? I feel like his Giant Steps changes would be badass for you to shred over, I can't imagine the kinds of shapes you'd be able to demolish by stacking twos and fives and modulating into different keys, would it be like sheets of sound for guitar?
So which comes first, solo or backing track? I have recently feel in love with the freedom of chord movement like you were doing here without the backing track dictating.
I wish I understood the theory in this video lol. I've played for over a decade, and I have all these techniques down, but I just picked the guitar up and learned assorted licks, scales etc learning songs and leads by ear, watching RU-vid videos... Until I developed a style where I can improvise based on what sounds "right" to me. I have no idea what key I'm in or what scale. Kind of learned all the advanced stuff and never bothered to learn the basics lol. I don't know how to start, either
What diminished chord were you using exactly as a passing tone from the C to the D? Do you just move the root up chromatically or do you grab it from a different relative key?
Also, nice new Tele there, but I always wonder and wish you would always post the details in your notes on your videos, but what "amp" did you use for this? Nice tone here for the Tele, thick and rich- is this through the AxeFX or a real amp- and which one of either? Was it your Nitro in AxeFX (which is my guess) or a real amp today?
Maybe you could make separate videos on individual theoretical tools you use in different situations eg diminished chords as passing chords and the other sorts of things you mentioned. This is great but it's kind of going at light speed so it's hard to take too much away from it - bit of a barrage of information.
What are Rick's thought processes while improvising amazing stuff? What to have for dinner, whether he left the kettle on, whether hawaiian pizza is a real pizza or not, and the merits of fighting 20 duck sized john petruccis
95% of this was over my head. when I improv I have no idea what notes or intervals I'm playing. it's all unconscious, I play what I hear in my head that I think will fit over the chords, sometimes I might stick to a scale or a key but that's it.
so I do some diatonic stuff then I add some widdly diddly diminished stuff then go in to some augmented widdilies and continue playing the rest of my boring diatonic stuff... k will do wish me luck.
omniu c it's funny you say that because, most of the new era guitar players, try so hard not to play diatonicaly, that those augmented and diminished stuff actually became boring!
If i focused more on guitar i would have been extremely well by now. Instead i focused on an female. Now? Heart broken. Your playing makes me go wow each time
I have no idea how to acquire such an intricate knowledge of guitar theory. I'm sure it all boils down to hours and hours of practice. It's probably the lack of structure that it this difficult.
Interestingly enough, I actually followed along there pretty much theoretically-wise- but technique-wise that fluidity of your playing and phrasing just lost me. Wow' your playing is fluid from one chord to the next. Now, I do have one question here- do you think of all those changes as full key changes per chord or more playing off the "chord of the moment" regardless of a "home" key? In other words- staying in key when it's diatonic, but true key changes when you move or modulate out of diatonic chord progressions? Is a parallel key a key change or a mode change in your thought process. Another video that would be REALLY HELPFUL, is not just your thought process, but how you decide to move from one chord to another. Those were pretty "random" chords there really, but I think they flow for you because of your combined jazz and classical background. You're using the diminished scale/chord to move to the next chord, and you seem to use a lot of dominant chords to modulate from, like substituting a dominant chord for a non-dominant chord to move to a new key, like A7 to D, for example. If A would have normally been a non-dominant chord, making it a dominant chord moves the progression to it's 5th, D. Does that make sense as a question?
