THESE PAST FEW lessons have all focused on a variety of the tools that I rely on to strengthen the narrative content in my guitar solos. Not note choices, but a wider view of the things that will help me to create better phrasing.
We’ve talked about repeating a melodic phrase over and over to build tension in a solo; about locking ourselves into a box and forcing ourselves to play in a single position, which I like to refer to as “handcuffs;” and last month we initiated our look into the device commonly referred to as call and response, whereby you play a phrase, listen to it and then answer it with a different phrase in a conversational way.