Improvising has always been seen a hallmark of a great musician. Pulling notes out of thin air and being able to play a musical melody without ever hitting a bad sounding note is pretty damn impressive.
Bragging rights aside, playing improvisation is a great way to exercise your listening skills as well as to get the creative juices flowing. By practicing improv based off of music theory, you will be working on the eventual goal of being able to translate what you hear in your head to what you're playing on your fretboard.
Perhaps you've tried to improvise before -- you had a song playing and you wanted to play lead guitar over it, but you realized that you don't know which notes on the fretboard you can play.
This is because you haven't found the right key. We've learned in one of our previous lessons that the key dictates which scales (and consequently which box patterns) you can use. So, once you know the key, you can play any note in that scale/key over the song and it'll sound "right".
Once you know what key you're in, you know which scales you can use. All scales, like the pentatonic scale, then have a few different box patterns that are a part of that scale. You can use any one of them in your improv playing. Let's take a look at how we might use pentatonic scale shape 1 to play along with a backing track:
This sounds good, but obviously gets pretty limited. Let's try using two boxes to vary it up. We'll use pentatonic scale shape 2 because it's immediately connected to shape one:
By practicing and knowing how these shapes connect with each other, you'll be able to gain fluidity up and down the fretboard, making your playing sound more interesting.
You might be wondering how you can find out which key to play in without memorizing box positions for every single scale. If you can't look up the key or you're too lazy to construct the key based on the notes being played, there's a nice method you can use to quickly figure out what you can play using the process of elimination and our knowledge about the pentatonic box shapes.
There are only two pentatonic box shapes where the notes are a distance of three frets apart on the high e string. They are box shapes 1 and 4.
Therefore, you can play along to a song and fiddle around on the high e string until you find a spot on the fretboard where playing notes three frets apart on the high e string sounds "correct". Once you find a spot, you can then do the same with the B string in order to narrow it down to shape one or four. Then bam, you know how the shapes map across the fretboard.
Let's go through an example. Say a song was playing in G♯ Major, but we didn't know this. Let's search for for the frets that sound good on the high e string that are 3 frets apart. So, let's try out the 6th & 3rd frets, the 5th & 2nd frets, and then the 4th and 1st frets:
Just from listening we can hear that the 4th & 1st fret pair sounded good, while the others sounded like they didn't really fit in with the backing track. So, we know that pentatonic box shapes 1 or 4 must lie underneath it.
We need to find out which of the two it is, so now we can fiddle around with the B string. We know that in pentatonic box shape 1, the notes on the B string are separated by 3 frets and in pentatonic box shape 4, the notes on the B string are separated by 2 frets, so we can try these notes out against the backing track as well.
From listening, it sounds like the C♯ (2nd string, 2nd fret) doesn't really sound good with neither the first G♯ major chord nor the third F minor chord. However, the C (2nd string, 1st fret) sounds like it harmonizes better. Therefore, we've deduced that the box shape is box shape one! Take a look:
And now that we know where box shape one is, we know all the connecting box shapes:
Now that you know what notes you can play, we need a reminder to not get too caught up and obsessed with theory and technique. Technically speaking, you can play your scales and box shapes over a track and it would sound good because it's in the right key. However, it would also sound incredibly boring and geometric.
Remember that music theory is a means to understand and define what you're playing, not something that should dictate what you should play. In this sense, you should always strive to add more emotion and feeling into your playing -- people will always prefer a better story teller without perfect technique than a highly technical player who is just hitting notes and not connecting with them.
A couple of tips to help add more depth to your playing
To get better at improvising, you need to practice. Two good ways to practice are to try to improvise on top of songs you like, or to play to a backing track. Here are a couple in A Minor, but you can search for backing tracks in any key on Youtube:
* Please note that GuitarLlama is in no way affiliated with these videos and tracks. Credit goes to the video creators who have posted them.
Another way to practice is to think of a melody in your head and sing it, and then try to play it using the pentatonic or major scale.
Hurrah! This concludes our Guitar Fretboard Mastery course! We hope that you've learned something and found it useful. Now take what you've learned and jam with people! Start a band, write and play music, and share the knowledge.
If you've liked our teaching style and want to learn more advanced, cooler topics, we'll be releasing advanced lessons soon. Stay tuned!
Advanced Lessons >>