I teach a lot – currently about 50 students per week – so I see a lot of struggles on the guitar. One of the things I see students struggle with most is improvisation, which is simply one of the most fun things you can do on a musical instrument.

Even with students who have done the work of learning and memorizing the necessary scale patterns used to improvise, I see an inability to turn those patterns into cool solos from their own imagination. Often this is the case even with students who can tear it up on solos they’ve learned from their favorite artists’ hit songs.

So how is it that they can play an awesome solo from some Led Zeppelin or Avenged Sevenfold song, yet, using all the same scale patterns, they can’t make up a decent sounding solo of their own?

Copying Helps, But Comprehending Is Better

Copying a solo you’ve learned off your favorite CD is an essential skill. All the legends of rock ‘n’ roll started out that way, slowing down their favorite Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and Chicago blues records and painstakingly learning to copy the solos note for note.

But comprehending the patterns behind those solos, and understanding how to make up your own solos, is better. And that takes a different type of homework, some of which I’ll describe below. The funny thing is, understanding how to make up your own solos will actually help you learn your favorite artists’ solos soooo much faster and more accurately.

That’s the whole point behind my Logical Lead Guitar course: to show you how to actually use the basic scale and arpeggio patterns to make up your own solos. That’s why I demonstrated, on camera, the thing I’ve never seen any other teacher demonstrate: how to tear those pentatonic and diatonic scale patterns and CAGED arpeggios into short little riffs.

After teaching scale patterns, most teachers then show you long – and sometimes very cool sounding – riffs that often move from one pattern into another, into another. The riffs might be really cool, but they make it too complicated to learn how to do anything but play those riffs – not to actually improvise on your own.

In my course I make it easy for you to understand and copy riffs and concepts that free you to improvise your own solos. Actually, I do teach you some longer, cool-sounding riffs too – but only after tackling the more important lesson of teaching you the bigger picture of how to tear the scales apart into short riffs.

Learn those little riffs, then take my advice to make up even more variations on those riffs, piece them together, and you’ll become more and more capable of playing your own lead guitar parts. Then, combine that with a study of some of your favorite artists’ work, and you’ll really start to get it.

Try This At Home

In this lesson I’ll explain a couple of methods of working on those scale patterns that will help make this happen for you.

1) Break each scale pattern into smaller sections. Instead of playing the scale pattern all the way across all six strings, it’s helpful sometimes to focus on just two or three strings at a time. Just play those smaller sections of the scale pattern over and over again, until you’re more fluent with using a handful of notes at a time.

2) Use method 1 and move between two adjacent scale patterns to become capable of flowing up and down the neck. In other words, play the first four notes of one scale pattern, then slide up the neck into the next scale pattern and play backwards, descending the scale, finally sliding back to your original starting note. I demonstrate this in detail in Logical Lead Guitar. It’s a practice technique I call “Locking the Puzzle Pieces,” because if you examine them, you’ll see that scale patterns fit together like puzzle pieces.

3) You cannot do enough of this: Noodle around with these scale patterns, and these little pieces of scale patterns. By “noodle around” I mean for you to begin getting used to improvising by playing ANYTHING at all with the notes in the pattern. Don’t be frustrated because you don’t immediately sound awesome. You won’t. In fact, to be painfully honest, you’ll probably suck, and everything you play will sound like s#*@.

But get over it, and keep doing it, again and again, over and over, for hours if you can! (It worked for me.) The more you do this, the more fluent you’ll become at moving randomly around the scale pattern. The more agile your fret-hand fingers will become. The more synchronized your pick hand will become. The more you’ll burn the scale pattern into your memory.

And gradually you’ll begin to find short little phrases that don’t suck. You’ll accidentally discover little riffs that sound like parts of solos your heroes play. You’ll start to be able to piece together two and three and four phrases that begin to add up into a decent guitar solo.

And by doing this you’ll begin to get the concept of how to solo, in a way that just learning solos from your favorite artists will never teach you.

This All Takes Time

You’re not going to master any skills on the guitar overnight. It takes a considerable investment of time to become truly proficient on any instrument. But it takes a considerable amount of time to move up the corporate ladder too, or to hit a baseball, or to paint a half-way decent watercolor.

Life is long. Just keep going.

You Can Do This!