Steve Stine Guitar Podcast

Mastering Guitar Improvisation: 5 Steps for Fluid and Creative Soloing

• Steve Stine

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Welcome to the Steve Stine Podcast! In today's episode, we'll be diving into "5 Steps to Fluid Improvisation." If you're looking to improve the fluidity of your guitar playing, whether you're a newbie or a seasoned player, this episode is packed with practical insights. Steve will take us through essential steps to get started, from creating the right backing track to build your practice on, to finding the perfect guitar tone that motivates you.

We'll explore concepts like improving your travel capacity across the fretboard, mastering rhythmic phrasing to create dynamic sentences, using repetition creatively, integrating sequences for added flair, and finally, making melodic connections to give your improvisation purpose. By the end of this episode, you'll have a solid framework to make your improvisation sound and feel more natural. So grab your guitar, and let's get started!

1. Travel Capacity - Navigating the Space: Imagine your home is like the fretboard of your guitar. Travel capacity is like knowing where the kitchen, living room, and bathroom are. If you're hosting a party, you need to comfortably move between spaces. In the same way, you need to move across the fretboard with ease and confidence, hitting key areas like scales and notes.

2. Rhythmic Phrasing - Conversational Flow: Think of this as the art of conversation at your party. You don't monologue the entire time (hopefully!). Instead, you have pauses and moments of listening. You might tell a story (a musical phrase), pause for reactions (holding or pausing on a note), and ask questions (creating dynamic contrast). It keeps the dialogue engaging, just as varying rhythm keeps your improvisation flowing.

3. Repetition - Creating Familiarity: Every good party has a few repeating elements—maybe a signature drink or a favorite playlist that cycles back. Repetition in your music, like riffs or motifs, creates something familiar that listeners can latch onto. It’s like giving your guests those recurring moments they’ll remember and look forward to.

4. Sequences - Patterns and Recipes: A well-run dinner party often has a sequence of events: appetizers, main course, dessert. Similarly, sequences in music are patterns that bring structure to your improvisation, adding a sense of progression and sophistication—like moving from one tasty dish to another.

5. Melodic Connection - The Signature Dish: Finally, your party might be known for a signature dish that everyone talks about. This is the melodic connection in your improvisation, the “E” note or theme you keep coming back to. It ties everything together and gives your improv a consistent flavor that makes it memorable

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Steve:

Today we're going to be talking about five steps that I think are going to help you a lot in learning how to improvise with more fluidity in your playing. Now, regardless of the key or the scales that you know or whatever, you can start this anytime you want, anywhere you are in your guitar journey, as long as you're working on scales and things like that. So, basically, what we need to do before we even begin, we need to make sure that we find or create a backing track. We even begin, we need to make sure that we find or create a backing track that is comfortable in the key, the tempo and the groove All right. So in order to practice what we're going to try and do here, you want to choose something that isn't a key that you're probably already working on. I'm going to be using E minor in this case. Maybe E minor is good for you, maybe A minor is good. The point is is don't choose something that's uncomfortable for you and then try and build this. Start with something that's already good for you. Tempo is very important because a lot of the things we're going to be talking about today are going to be based technically on your ability of being able to move around the fretboard and create things. So if the, if the tempo is way too fast, you're setting yourself up for failure already. So maybe choose something that's a little bit slower. You know, if you practice with a metronome on a regular basis, you already kind of know what skill sets you have relative to those practice regimens. So, and the third thing is the groove making sure that you've got something that feels good, whether it's a swing groove or kind of a straight feel, whatever it might be, find something that feels good to you. And then the last thing, before we get started, is make sure you set yourself up with a guitar tone that feels good to you. Now I'm going to be playing with some delay and reverb on here. Okay, that's what I'm going to be using for this. It's just kind of a lead tone, but you could use anything you want.

Steve:

Point is is, if you really want to get comfortable with this, make a good sounding guitar tone for you that feels good to you and is kind of motivational for you. If you're playing, you know, with a guitar tone that isn't really working, it's going to be frustrating to begin with. All right, I find that very important, all right. So let's get to the five things. The first thing I'm going to call travel capacity. Now the backing track again that I'm going to be using is going to be in E minor.

Steve:

Travel capacity is your ability to be able to move around inside a particular position across the fretboard, whatever it is that your capability is, or you want it to be, all right, learning how to travel around. So that might mean moving up and down, right Again, around. So that might mean moving up and down, right Again, I'm in E minor, pentatonic or diatonic. So my ability to move up and down a particular position, or maybe I'm moving side to side more horizontally, whatever it might be. Another thing to be aware of is when you jump over things. You might jump over strings, which we call string skipping, but you might also jump over notes moving horizontally. I mean, there's lots of different kinds of things that you can do to make it sound interesting, but the point is your capacity of being able to move around while the music is playing. If you only know one position, it's going to be very difficult to move anywhere else on the fretboard, and that's okay. You'd want to work in that position, right. But the point is, is, as you keep doing this, you can keep expanding how much you know of the fretboard and how confident you are with being able to travel around it. Okay, so you can use pentatonic, you can use diatonic, whatever you want.

Steve:

The last thing I'll say is just a term that I use. It's called closed versus open playing, and when you try and play things that are maybe a bit more traditional in the blues sense or a classic rock kind of sense, you tend to play a bit closed, in a position Kind of that sort of thing. Great playing, okay, lots of stuff you can do with that. Open position playing for me is when you try and think about things that are a bit wider with that kind of sound. It's just a mentality for me, but it makes a big difference when I want to play something, maybe that's a little more. You know Allman Brothers or something like that. I might think a little more closed If I was thinking a bit more of something like Joe Satriani or something. I might be thinking a bit more open. Just something to think about a little bit when you're practicing this. So let's go through travel capacity.

Steve:

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to play this track for you. It's just E, minor C and D is all I'm using in this, okay, so listen to it just a little bit. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to think about where the quarter note is going to be, and it doesn't matter if you call it a quarter note, it's just where am I tapping my foot or, you know, stepping my fingers or whatever? And then I'm gonna go with double that, and then I'm gonna go with double that, and those are basically the three things that I have to work with as I'm moving around my fretboard, as I'm traveling. Done, done, done, done.

Steve:

Now I'm probably going to lean toward the slower subdivision first, just to get used to things, but I want to be aware of those. So let me just kind of show you as best I can without using these other ones, kind of what I'm talking about here. We'll be right back, okay? So you get the idea. Now I am using some of these other things too, and let's talk about those. So my travel capacity is my comfortability of being able to move around inside a position, multiple positions, one particular scale, like pentatonic maybe I'm using some diatonic in there, whatever it is but really getting comfortable with my capability of organically moving around the fretboard in this key, at this tempo, with this groove, right.

Steve:

So the next thing is what I'll call rhythmic phrasing. Now rhythmic phrasing is going to be pausing, so we're creating sentences. Right, that's really what we're doing Now. The sentences that we're creating might be a little longer at times, might be shorter, at times might be just one note that we're hanging on, or maybe we're stopping. We're literally stopping playing the guitar and leaving some pause. These are all rhythmic things that we can do with these subdivisions quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, if you will, I can use any of those. So, becoming aware of this rhythmic thing that I can do when I'm playing.

Steve:

Now, the phrasing may occur in one of two ways. Either it's occurring because I'm intentionally trying to stop somewhere, because I want a phrase to be a certain length, and sometimes the phrasing occurs because my brain is getting frozen and I'm out of ideas at that moment, and that's okay, that's a reality. You might be doing something and all of a sudden it just you're at that moment in time, you're at a loss. So that might be a good time to stop, reset yourself. Maybe it's somewhere else on the fretboard, maybe it's just something that you're thinking about, or just moving to somewhere else in that same position and then start up again. So as I'm moving around, see, now, all of a sudden you'll notice I'm gonna start using some phrasing. Now I don't have to stop necessarily, I don't have to go, I can and I should.

Steve:

Sometimes it's just pausing on a note and allowing that note to ring out and learning how to do that in different places, so everything doesn't sound like, like you see, where the phrase is the same over and over and over. Now we're going to get to repetition in a little bit and that can be beneficial and we should use it, but at this point what we're really trying to do is just learn how to almost scat sing with our traveling around the fretboard. Let me start this track again. Okay, thank you See. So, just again, being aware that I can pause on a note, in a phrase, in a movement across the fretboard, this traveling that I'm doing to create larger or smaller phrases, I can stop playing. I can simply pause and hold on a note. There's lots of different kinds of things that I can do.

Steve:

Doing that on a bend is a great thing to do. For instance, you might play, you know, and stay there for quite a long period of time. So everything doesn't always have to be about how fast you go, although you do want to develop that aspect of your ability on the fret board, you know. Again, I hate to always bring this up, but it comes back to that thing where people say, well, there's more feel in one note than a thousand notes. Well, maybe that's true, but if you're only only playing one note for an entire solo, it's going to get awfully boring after a while, right? So you've got to be able to use dynamics and diversity in your playing. So if you're playing, you're moving between these subdivisions. It's going to keep things interesting. Moving between these subdivisions. It's going to keep things interesting If you're being aware of pausing or stopping on different beats, creating different sizes of phrases. It sounds interesting. The whole point is, you know, just, I call it dynamic contrast. You're trying to keep things interesting for a listener.

Steve:

Now, the next thing we're going to talk about is repetition, and repetition, for me, is really important because that's where we'll do something. Whether it's intentional or it's just accidental, or we can call organic, we can start doing something over and over and over, and it creates this energy within itself. And the audience or the listener will hear that and go oh okay, I'm aware of what's happening and I can hear it because obviously it's happening over and over and over Versus just one long, you know run-on concept. We can use repetition. So sometimes we use a particular, maybe a lick that we've learned and we want to add that in. Maybe we're just moving around and we create some element of repetition that we like and we want to continue doing it. So what I'm going to do is start again, just kind of jam in here and show you what I mean. So I'm going to use a little repetition in more of an organic way and then See, right there, that might be more of a lick that I'm adding in an idea that I've practiced, that I can fit in into this groove, into this tempo, and it sounds kind of cool. I'm not. I don't need to be led by the licks, right? Sometimes we think, well, we have to learn a bunch of licks and maybe you do. There's nothing wrong with that.

Steve:

But for me, when I teach, I always try and get people to understand that the confidence and the ability to be able to navigate across the fretboard this traveling, if you will, is what really gives you this ability to be in control at all times, especially if you can do it at the tempo, of course, that you've. You're, the musical situation that you're in has a tempo that you're comfortable with, that you can do this with. If the tempo gets faster, it's going to start limiting what things you can do, and that's okay. You're going to have to be a little careful, or the next song might be more in your tempo. You know something that's more comfortable for you. So you just have to be aware of these things all the time. You know if the key is awkward or the tempo's too fast or something, you gotta rein it in a little bit, right. But when it's something that's right in your wheelhouse, you can really let go and do whatever you want. So repetition can be used all over the place. So I'm gonna again start kind of meandering here, traveling around, and then if I come across something, I'm going to try and make some sort of repetition with it guitar solo.

Steve:

So now we get to the next one, which is sequences. Now, at this tempo or whatever is comfortable for you. What's really nice is if you can develop something that has a bit more energy and I'm going to show you just a simple sequence idea. So let's say I was doing something where I'm in E minor, but I'm going to look at this as E minor, diatonic okay, natural minor, not just pentatonic. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this idea, so I'm just playing the scale, but I'm just going one back and then going up from there and then going back and then back and I'm going forward each time.

Steve:

Now when I do this I could stay in this position or at any time I could shift out and start traveling, so I might do something where I go. You know, I don't have to stay in this one position, I can go wherever I want. But this works really well. When you're trying to jam over something, you don't have to do it for a long time, but it adds this repetition through a sequence that sounds kind of cool guitar solo, see what I mean? So sequences are really nice for just adding some extra flair to what you're doing. They take practice and you gotta work on a particular pattern that you like or whatever. And then the last thing I'll say is just, this whole thing is at some point learning how to give all of this a purpose, which is melodic connection.

Steve:

Okay now, primarily I'm in the key of E, minor here. So E would be a great note for me to try and target and I can learn to target the other notes in each chord. You know people are always saying, well, what about the third or what about the fifth? You can target whatever you want. Okay, as you learn all of these things, but in the beginning just keep it nice and easy If you can learn where the E is, and then maybe you leave and you go to an E and you don't have to go to the E every time and in a certain place all the time.

Steve:

The point is is, if you're never really making an intentional melodic connection, it's all just accidental. You know, hopefully I'll learn land on the right note at the right time. Listen, it happens and we all do it. You know to a certain degree where you know you try and get lucky here and there. But if you do it all the time, there's never consistency in creating some sort of melody. So before you worry about going to the root and then going to the third and then going to the fifth and then going to each note of the chord.

Steve:

Start with something really easy, because if you start overthinking this, oftentimes your listener will lose.

Steve:

You're thinking too hard and you're trying too hard and you're doing too much and the melody goes away. Think about it. Think about really basic things that you might hear Again if I start this. Okay, so you see, I can make something up. That's just really basic, but it has a theme and it has a melody that you can identify with, versus just going to notes all over the place going well, that was a fifth and that was a third, but that was a third to that chord. You might be able to make that work, but you need to be aware of creating, maybe, a theme when you're doing this, and an easy place to start is just start with the theme of just going to, for instance, in the note E. You don't have to do it every time, you don't have to go to it every measure, right, but just become aware of directing your motion towards something, and in this case it would be that note E. So hopefully this helps you in better understanding some approaches that you can take to make your improvisation sound and feel more natural.

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