How To Improvise On Guitar In Real-Life Situations
Improvising in real-life situations (such as playing in front of an audience) is not the same as improvising on your own at home. Most guitarists never develop real-life improvising skills and end up playing terrible once they go on stage for the first time. Don't let this frustrating moment happen for you! ...Or if it already has, learn how to prevent it from ever happening again.
Watch this video to learn the best way to get better at improvising on guitar in real-life situations:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Implement the advice from this video into your playing and practicing. It will feel humbling at first and you will make more mistakes temporarily.
But as your skills improve – your playing will become more consistent and you will feel a lot more confident playing in front of other people.
Want more help with preparing your guitar technique for real-life playing?
Follow this guitar practice circuit:
Step 1: Choose something specific you want to master and play it while standing up for 6 repetitions.
Step 2: Play the specific item you chose in step 1 while practicing your stage presence and movement. For example, hold the guitar up in the air and make cool arm and hand gestures to the audience. Do this without looking at your hands. Repeat this 9 times, but don’t play anything else other than the specific item you chose in step 1.
As soon as this is done, immediately move to:
Step 3: Play your item while walking around the room. Repeat 8 times in a row.
As soon as this is done, immediately move to:
Step 4: Play the item for 7 repetitions with your eyes closed. Do your best to play without mistakes (although mistakes will happen in this step). If you make mistakes, do your best to play through them while keeping your eyes closed.
As soon as this is done, immediately move to:
Step 5: Insert a specific guitar playing mistake into your playing of the item. Yes, you read correctly: select a specific guitar playing mistake and intentionally insert it into your playing. Repeat the item 4 times through with the specific mistake you selected. (More about how to do this below.)
As soon as this is done, immediately move to:
Step 6: Play the item 5-15 beats per minute faster than your top speed of consistent playing. Repeat 4 times.
(Don’t know what top speed of consistent playing is? Read this guitar speed report to find out.)
Repeat this circuit nonstop for 15-20 minutes.
Now you know how to prepare your guitar chops for real-life playing. The next step is to transform the rest of your musical skills, so you can put it all together and play guitar the way you always wanted and dreamed about.
I can help you with this inside my personalized Breakthrough Guitar Lessons. Unlike some one-size-fits-all course, you won’t get generic lessons with me.
I create guitar lessons specifically designed with you in mind.
Your lessons consist of exercises, drills, concepts and techniques and that break down your goals into bite-sized steps that improve your playing.
As you follow these steps – you become a better guitar player. Same way you follow the navigation system in your car to get where you want to go.
And as you practice your lessons, I’ll see and hear you play a lot more than a typical teacher might.
For example: in private lessons a teacher would only see or hear you play once per week. The rest of the time (in between your lessons) you are on your own.
(This is how bad habits often form without you realizing it. Habits that can take months to solve.)
When you work with me, I'm most active in helping you in between the lessons (when you need my help the most).
For example:
- You can show me your playing every single day if you want – just post a recording of your playing on my student forum.
- You can also send me recordings separately for in-depth feedback on your playing and practicing on a regular basis.
- You can ask me questions and show me your playing every week in live video Office Hours. I hop on Zoom for an hour to help you with whatever you feel stuck on. You show me your playing (and ask about your guitar playing challenges) during this time and I help you.
- Every week I do live video training classes where I can see you play guitar as well and give you more personal help with your playing.
- Depending on what you write in your feedback form about each lesson (I ask you to leave me feedback about each part of what I teach you) I sometimes may ask you to send me a yet another recording of your playing. This way I get to see you play whatever you struggle with and can adjust your lesson strategy (if needed) to help you improve faster.
All you have to do is practice what I tell you to do at least 30 minutes per day 5 times per week.
If you can practice more – that’s great. But if you practice the lessons I give you just 30 minutes per day, it becomes almost impossible for you not to improve.
Check out the results my guitar students are achieving:
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
“Before the online guitar lessons, I had a lot of trouble with phrasing. I couldn’t make good note choices, I was always fishing for the next note. I was trying to think of ways that I could play, but it didn’t sound good. I didn’t know how to write songs, it was absolutely terrible, everything sounded the same. I couldn’t really… I didn’t feel confident with my playing. I definitely couldn’t build speed for anything, I was really sloppy and I was dissonant… and it was really painful to play.”
I chose Tom Hess because when I read his articles they blew my mind away. I got so much out of that, that I didn’t get anywhere else.
The main reason I like taking lessons with Tom online is because, number one: yes it was the personalized lessons strategy… I read everything about it, and it was so compelling, just like that he really takes everything that I can or can’t do into account, and then he’ll take what I want to be able to do and then basically map out every step of the way until I get there. And that was just really powerful, and that I’d be able to get feedback every 6 weeks, and the fact that we’ve got the forum. We’ve got instant help and they all really know what they’re talking about… they’re not just like anybody… they… I mean some of them are virtuoso guitar players... I mean, they know their stuff and then of course the mindset of this whole environment. The friends I’ve made here just… I can’t really put into words.
I didn’t have a budget when I started. I had a good enough job that I could take lessons for however long I wanted, so that wasn’t a problem, but I feel like I’ve gotten 100 times what I paid you know.
Matteo Miller, San Diego, California, USA
“I just love guitar lessons with Tom, he literally takes the time to make a specific lesson plan and sends you lessons as you need it.”
My last lesson I took with a local guitar teacher before joining Tom, I was struggling with a sweep picking pattern, which was the 5 string root major, I was really struggling to get the rolling technique down. I took it to my guitar teacher and I was like “Help me with this, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” This is his exact phrase: “At high speeds, it doesn’t really matter if you can play it clean or not, no one can hear it anyway.” At that point, I was just like, “Ah man.” But thankfully, in that same message, he mentioned Tom’s name. Then the doors opened. That very night, I went home and looked at every single lesson Tom had, had my guitar in hand, every YouTube lesson on you know “correct motions”, “play this over chords”... just applied it instantly, and it was instant results within an hour... just from his free stuff. I was like, oh man, I’ve got to do lessons with this guy.
I remember when I first started out with lessons, I instantly jumped on the forum to greet myself, and it’s amazing how there’s like 30 responses. Just like, “Hi welcome.” and stuff... “Hi Dan, great musical tastes”. That made me feel really at home and welcomed into Tom’s forum and community. Every time I’ve had an issue when I was first starting out be it like theory or technique, there’s always been someone there who’s helped. Otherwise it could’ve been this potentially awkward process where I’d have to wait a whole week to get an answer from my teacher, who even then may not have answered it correctly and may have never solved it. Whereas there are guys on there who have been with Tom and have been through exactly what I’ve been through. They know exactly how to help, in what order, what information you need... it’s just a friendly atmosphere really.Dan Mayhew, Stowmarket, UK
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