Now we’ll add two more words. In terms of language acquisition, maybe you can picture “give,” “me,” and “now.” In terms of musical a...
Before you start to play, imagine the possibilities: give. Give, give, give. Give me! Give now! Give me now! Now give! There are lots of possibilities. Combine them with the nuance of emotion in your mind: pleading, begging, demanding, asking. Is your musical child curious or angry? Hungering or relatively indifferent?
Now record a backing track and use our three word vocabulary. See what you can do. See how it feels. Notice how you’re becoming familiar with what the notes are going to sound like over each chord. Become aware of what you hear when you go from the first note to the second, or the first to the third, or the second to the third. Is it different when you reverse the order? How?
After you’ve got three notes down, add the other scale tones one at a time. In a half hour, you can easily go from using one note to using three or four, maybe even five, and being confident about what they’ll sound like.
When that happens, you’ve started soling deliberately. It’s no longer a “poke and pray” situation. You aresaying something with music!
I’m a big fan of learning music theory. But theory follows function: some composer did something, and theorists created rules to describe what happened. In English (or any other language), grammar follows usage: people learn to speak first, and then learning grammar helps them speak “˜properly’. If they choose, they can speak “˜improperly’ – doing it for effect. It’s their choice.
But the point here is that they learned to speak before there was ever a distinction between proper and improper speech – you start by learning to say something, and then refine as you gain experience and knowledge. And you learn to speak with meaning by starting with one word.
Try it. I’ve heard students make amazing progress in just one or two lessons with this approach (and they’ve heard it too!) Even if you consider yourself pretty expert at soloing, I think you’ll find the exercise pretty eye opening.
