My blogs

Everybody Needs Some Bop

Blogs I follow

Creative Guitar Studio

Andrew Wasson - Official Website

About me

Introduction	There's no such thing as someone who can't improvise! There are a lot of arguments against learning and teaching in a lick-by-lick style. Their concerns are that it won't help a person create music "in the moment." I only somewhat agree. On one hand, if you ONLY do a bunch of rote learning of a bunch of random licks, of course it won't really be of help to you when you set out to do the real thing. That I agree with. However, there is a benefit to learning licks when you go about it in a particular way. It's all about the application in my opinion - and I'm speaking from first hand experience. If you learn a lot of licks, and practice them in many keys, you begin to make yourself a reference for not only SOUNDS, but for positions, and patterns, and the SOUNDS that they make! Sounds that you may not have otherwise known about, or explored! After you learn these references, improvising - getting the sounds that are IN your head OUT of your head - becomes an easier task! It's because you have learned that you can attain a certain sound by doing a certain thing, and these sounds become available to you when you play!

Introduction

There's no such thing as someone who can't improvise! There are a lot of arguments against learning and teaching in a lick-by-lick style. Their concerns are that it won't help a person create music "in the moment." I only somewhat agree. On one hand, if you ONLY do a bunch of rote learning of a bunch of random licks, of course it won't really be of help to you when you set out to do the real thing. That I agree with. However, there is a benefit to learning licks when you go about it in a particular way. It's all about the application in my opinion - and I'm speaking from first hand experience. If you learn a lot of licks, and practice them in many keys, you begin to make yourself a reference for not only SOUNDS, but for positions, and patterns, and the SOUNDS that they make! Sounds that you may not have otherwise known about, or explored! After you learn these references, improvising - getting the sounds that are IN your head OUT of your head - becomes an easier task! It's because you have learned that you can attain a certain sound by doing a certain thing, and these sounds become available to you when you play!