I've been a bedroom guitar player for many years, I've been a musician for 0. Since my time as a guitar player has not been spent playing guitar with other people or writing music I find myself lost when I want to create or add something to a song. I've recently started playing in the praise band at church and always get asked if I can add something to the songs. I have no problem learning the lead guitar parts to the song but when it comes time to add something extra thats not written I am lost.


What I am hoping to learn is how to choose notes that follow along with the lyrics? I know most the major, minor and penatonic scales but applying them seems to be a different story.

arond the 2:30-2:45 mark in the video below is a good example.



any advise?

Thanks
revalation22_5

Would love to give you advice but actually I can't.

I just follow my ears and if it sounds right, I do it.
Sometimes it's hard work, sometimes it just comes to me.

But then again, improvising was the main way I started to play guitar, just playing around with notes.
If you are not used to improvising, it can be hard. Your ears need to be trained first.

If you have an understanding for music theory, it might help a lot to learn all the different modes and the respective keys.
I don't understand music theory at all but I know my way around my fretboard, so this makes it easy for me to improvise.

Another big help is playing covers and to look, which notes are played in which key and mode.
Then you can start to move notes around, which again needs trained ears.

So, the only advice I could give you is: learn modes and keys and play covers to see, how popular artists do it.
One more thing: there's videos on YouTube where you can learn certain guitar licks.
Learn to play them and try to move them up and down the fretboard to transcribe them into different keys.

Dunno if this helps you, but it helped me.

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Hi revelation22_5: hmm, well your example leaves me slightly confused as to what you're aiming for. To be sure, 2.30-2.45 in the clip is just about the only part of the track where the guitar relates to the rest of the song in any way at all. All the rest is just shrieky shredding that might as well have been cut and pasted from any one of hundreds of other tracks - which is one of the foremost problems with that type of playing.

All he's doing from 2.30 is taking notes from the home key and making a simple rising phrase out of them. Easy, and the best thing he does on the song.

I'm not sure that's an ideal track to study for what you're talking about. A nice way to approach this issue is to take things back to basics. A thing that's too often forgotten by ego-driven young guitarists is that their job is to serve the song. So where you could begin is to listen carefully to the melody of the lyric and start simply by playing that note for note. Then think about decorating it a bit with some little licks of your own choosing, and remembering all the time where the fundamental intervals are, such as thirds and fifths. Build it from there.

Whether he's your taste or not, a player such as Dave Gilmour is surpremely good at this. He is endlessly voted amongst the all-time favourite guitarists in polls and for sure that is not because of his virtuoso talent - because ten thousand players in the world have more of that sort of skill than him - but because he is so melodically strong, which gives his solos a vastly more musical foundation than so many others. You could take all the licks and florishes away from Gilmour's solos and they'd still be almost as good. That's because he always has the tune running in his head.

Tunes are a remarkably undervalued thing amongst so many guitarists.

Another tip is to compose away from the instrument. Go for a long walk with the track in your mind and make up parts by humming them. You can't hum or whistle that shreddy stuff - but anything that's really musical and interesting can be hummed. Louis Armstrong's wife, Lil Hardin, said she never heard him play a note that she hadn't heard him whistling around the house first. There's a great lesson for all improvisational musicians in that.

Cheers - C

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