How To Easily Improvise Awesome Guitar Licks

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Here are some more tips on making your guitar solos awesome:

Tip: How To Play Guitar With Shred Speed Without Sounding Like A Robot

Playing guitar with speed isn't just a way to show off your skills - it's also a great tool for creating tension in your phrasing.

Combine these two tips together to get powerful results in your phrasing and soloing:

Tip #1: Make playing with speed a lot easier

To push your guitar speed to another dimension take a very small segment of any scale lick, arpeggio, or drill and perform it at a much higher speed than you can play the full phrase at.

For instance, if you are playing this part at 140 bpm, work on these small fragments at 5 bpm more.

This will sync both your hands and your mind used to faster speeds but still keep it manageable for you to play (since you are only practicing a handful of notes at a time).

Then slowly extend the phrase until you are improving the whole guitar part at that faster tempo.

However, when doing this don't let your two hand sync to get off at the faster speeds.

Work on this by double picking the notes at a much slower bpm.

Tip #2: Make playing with interesting phrasing easier

Just like with guitar speed, using a limited amount of notes also makes it easier to improve the quality of your phrases.

How?

Try this:

Choose any 3-5 notes from a scale, lick or arpeggio pattern.

Improvise freely with these notes for several minutes while using as many techniques as possible to make each phrase sound very expressive and unique from the others. This improves your ability to play with emotion and think on your toes.

Bonus tip: Alternate using slow, melodic phrases with fast bursts of speed to get better at building and releasing tension. This gives you the power to control the level of emotion and intensity in your phrases.

Guitar Practice Exercise For Avoiding Sloppy Mistakes At Fast Speeds To Keep Your Phrases Clean

No doubt, your guitar phrases will always sound bad if you are unable to play with both speed and accuracy.

Don't let sloppy notes ruin your solos!

Try this:

Work on listening your mistakes as you play at faster tempos.

As an example, when you are playing a fast lick at or near your highest speed and find that your hands aren't in sync, you need to be able to determine which note( s) are not clean as you are actively playing.

To do that, your listening ability needs to become much more polished.

Get going by breaking up challenging guitar licks into small portions of a few notes at once. Then work on these few notes at your greatest speed. This makes it less complicated to locate your mistakes.

Another approach that will help you during faster tempos (particularly with legato) is to move between faster playing and slower, more melodic playing numerous times (in 25 second periods).

When you only play fast for a few minutes at a time, inevitably your hand becomes tired and your technique gets sloppy (strengthening bad habits).

So if you go back and forth between slow and fast playing in quick bursts of energy you are able to develop your muscle memory by assessing perfect slower technical motions before playing again at your max speed.

This is great for helping you to learn the proper motions quickly and ingrain them into your top speeds.

As you make improvements to your listening, you will begin noticing the particular missteps you make at higher speeds (with all things you know how to play) and you know precisely how to fix them.

How To Improve Rhythmic Timing For Tighter Phrasing

Often we play a bit in front of or after the beat.

This produces guitar playing that doesn't sound very good.

Easy!

This just shows you need to train becoming more tight with your rhythm playing. Timing is a very vital skill you will need to develop, even more for playing in bands and/or doing any kind of studio work.

So, what do you do when you need to improve on playing with better timing (tighter)?

Very first step is to set up your metronome.

The very best way to improve at it is to try recording yourself with a metronome and listen back to what you played.

Listen closely for defects in your timing.

As you learn to hear where the timing issues happen, it is somewhat simple to fix your mistakes and play very tight.

The tighter your playing is, the better you become at staying in-time with your phrases while improvising or playing solos over backing tracks.

Note: Don't use lots of guitar effects such as flange, chorus or reverb during your practice.

These types of effects often mask mistakes in your technique (such as poor articulation for instance) and they don't get corrected them. Also, when playing fast, if there is some effect being combined with overdrive, it becomes very difficult to pick up all the notes making your playing sound more sloppy than it really is.