If I Could Teach Only One Lesson: Improvisation

This video was a long time in the making. It's my attempt to teach a beginner-friendly, end-to-end lesson that can get any guitarist experiencing the feeling of improvising over chord changes in under 15 minutes. It's an ambitious goal, and I'm not 100% sure I pulled it off — watch it and judge for yourself.

The companion PDF is available above.

Improv 101: A new beginner-friendly framework for guitar improvisation

Introduction

Gaining comfort moving around the fretboard and doing a little improvisation is a core skill that every guitar player can develop, and it can be a lot easier than it appears. Improvisation is notoriously hard to teach because it’s difficult for experienced players to remember how challenging it is to keep everything you need in your head while also trying to make up a new melody on the fly. So much of it has become second nature to them that many improvisers can’t even explain how they do it.

The obvious bottlenecks to improvisation include knowing what scales and arpeggios to use and which notes to emphasize when, but one frequently overlooked bottleneck is your brain’s attention and focus. This lesson is designed to simplify finding the right notes so you’ll still have enough attentional brainpower to focus on making music with those notes.

This lesson is aimed at guitar players of all levels. I’ve tried to construct it with as few prerequisites as possible, so between this written version and the YouTube video, my goal is for you to have everything you need to get started. So, if you’re a guitar player at any level, this lesson will get you jamming over the classic “Stairway to Heaven” outro chord progression using a simplified version of chord tone soloing. To go further (and with more intermediate steps), I invite you to check out the full Fret Science: Improv 101 course.

Step 1: Understand the “warp”

Moving a pattern like a chord or scale horizontally on the fretboard is easy, but the masterminds who created standard tuning on the guitar made it slightly more challenging to move them vertically to a different set of strings.

This is because the tuning between the G and B strings is a different distance than every other pair of strings, which creates an invisible barrier that Jon Finn dubbed the “warp refraction threshold.”¹ I just call it the “warp.” You can think of it as a hidden line between the G and B strings with one special property.

The simplest way to think about the warp is to remember that whenever a geometric fretboard pattern falls across the warp, the portion on the high strings is shifted one fret toward the bridge. I convey this in diagrams by a slanted arrow with heads on both sides so you can remember that if you start playing a pattern on the higher strings and cross over the warp to the lower strings, the rest of the pattern should be shifted down one fret toward the nut.

We can illustrate the effect of the warp with a simple octave shape. Starting on the low E or A string, you can find a note one octave higher by shifting up two strings and two frets toward the bridge:

This shape can fall across the warp in two ways:

Step 2: Use the “stack” shape to play the pentatonic scale

Inside the “Form 1” pentatonic scale pattern that virtually every guitarist learns is a shape I call the “stack.” It consists of three adjacent strings with notes two frets apart stacked on top of each other.

All five pentatonic scale notes can be found inside this shape, and we can make those five notes sound like different scales by choosing different positions within the shape to play the role of the root, or the home note in the scale.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to memorize where to find the root inside the stack. You will use the root location constantly in improvisation. If the root is in the upper nut-side corner, this shape contains the notes of the major pentatonic scale. If the root is on the upper note of the middle string, this shape contains the notes of the minor pentatonic scale. Which minor or major pentatonic scale is determined by the name of the note that is serving as root.

For the rest of this lesson, we will be using the minor pentatonic scale, so the root will always be the upper note on the middle string of the stack.

The stack appears in three different ways depending on where it falls on the fretboard relative to the warp.

Getting your fingers accustomed to playing the stack shape in all three configurations is really important. You will find that some licks are more natural on one shape than another, and I believe that’s the genius of standard tuning—it forces us to play slightly differently in different positions on the neck, which leads to more creative options.

Step 3: Know where to find the root all over the fretboard

In this lesson, we’ll be playing the A minor pentatonic scale, so we will need to be able to find A notes all over the fretboard.

On a 6-string 22-fret guitar, there are 12 A notes, which gives us 12 different locations to place a stack. In several of those locations, part of the stack will be missing, but that’s okay…you can still play the notes that are reachable!

If you haven’t memorized all of the A note locations on the fretboard, this is a good time to start. Believe me, it’s worth it. It’s by far the fastest way to jump from one part of the fretboard to another.

If you learn the four locations on the low E and A strings, you can easily identify all of the other locations using the octave shape I mentioned earlier. Or you can memorize the locations on the high E and B strings and work backward using the octave shape to find the others. Practice both! It’s always valuable to be able to think about things from more than one perspective. I prefer to start from the higher strings because those are the root locations I most often use when improvising.

One of the coolest things about the pentatonic stack is that it starts and ends on the same note (via the octave shape between the lowest and highest note). This means that stacks connect together diagonally, which leads to extended shapes that are like superhighways of the fretboard.

In standard tuning, there are two pathway shapes using just stacks that cover most of the fretboard. These are by far the most frequently-used ways that guitarists move up and down the neck.

Both of these pathways have partial copies on other parts of the fretboard. The first pathway starts again at the fifteenth fret of the low E string, and the second one starts again at the fifth fret of the high E string. This latter pathway is also useful and worth exploring because it incorporates some open strings.

Step 4: Find and target chord tones

A lot of the challenge in improvisation is being able to target the notes of chords as they’re being played by the band. What I mean by targeting a note is emphasizing it in your phrase by playing it longer, landing it on a downbeat or chord change, or articulating it to make it stand out (wide vibrato, anyone?). Emphasizing chord tones as the chords change is one of the ways we convey to the listener— “hey, this guitar player knows what they’re doing.”

You won’t always play chord tones, but you definitely want to be able to on demand. That means being aware of the chords you’re playing over and what notes they contain. We won’t have to think of the notes by name because we’ll be able to visualize them as positions relative to the stack shape.

In this lesson, we’ll be using the chord progression from the outro section of “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin. In a jam session, the outro to “Stairway” is usually played as a repeated vamp over the chords Am, G, and F. The F triad is played twice as long as the other chords.

In the studio recording, the chords are slightly different and a tiny bit more complex (they play Am, C/ G, and Fmaj7), but the good news is that you can play over either variation without changing your general strategy. The same scales and target notes will work for both.

We will use the A minor pentatonic scale as a “home base” and practice targeting notes from the Am and F chords at the right times. We can generally ignore the G chord because it goes by quickly, and the most important time to target a chord tone is when you are beginning or ending a phrase. With a vamp like this, beginning a phrase on the first chord and ending it on the last chord is natural (but don’t always start your phrases on a downbeat — that gets old fast!). Whatever happens between the target notes on the starting and ending chords is less prominent to the listener, and all of the A minor pentatonic scale notes will sound great.

Let’s take a look at how the notes of the Am and F chords fall against the stack shape.

Notice that all three of the notes from the Am triad are contained in the Am pentatonic scale. This is partly why the Am pentatonic scale sounds so good played over an Am chord.

Notice that the root of the F triad—an F note—is not contained in the Am pentatonic scale, but it’s easy to find nearby. Also, notice that the lower bridge-side note of the scale is only one fret away from the F note. That scale note will sound dissonant over the F chord, so don’t dwell on it! Also, be wary of bending the note in the upper bridge-side corner up a full step over the F chord for the same reason.

There are two other locations where you can find an F note to resolve your phrases, and it’s worth practicing landing on these notes. The F note is especially effective in part because that is the only chord tone not shared with the Am chord.

Practice ideas

Exercise 1: Spend some time playing over a “Stairway” backing track using the stack shape in the 5th or 17th fret position (on the A, G, and D strings). Practice creating two-bar phrases that flow through one repetition of the vamp. Psychologically, the first and last* *notes you emphasize are the ones that will make the strongest impression on the listener, so practice starting your phrases on a note from the Am triad and ending them on a note from the F triad. Don’t always use the same target notes…mix things up! Explore how each note sounds against each chord, and practice controlling the amount of dissonance you create and resolve. This is a great example of attention management. By limiting yourself to a small region of the fretboard and thinking about target notes for only two chords, you are (hopefully) leaving your brain some space to focus on musicality.

Note that at the beginning of the phrase, you can bend the D note in the upper bridge-side corner of the stack a full step up to E, which is the 5th of the Am triad. Use hammer-ons and pull-offs within the stack. Slide into or out of your target notes. Add vibrato to taste. If you can’t create at least a few good-sounding phrases with this small pattern, you’re not yet ready to expand to other parts of the fretboard. But when you are ready…

Exercise 2: Try moving the stack to other locations on the fretboard. This is a great time to practice finding all the A notes across the entire neck. Stick to one stack location at a time, but be sure to explore the three different shapes that the stack can form as it interacts with the warp.

When that starts to feel easy…

Exercise 3: Practice making phrases that move from stack to stack. Don’t forget to stick the landing with a note from the F major triad. You can always find an F note one fret toward the bridge from the lower bridge-side corner of the stack, but you can also target the 3rd or 5th!

What next?

It can be a challenge to maintain the listener’s interest when playing over a sustained vamp like this. Jimmy Page is a master at building intensity over the course of a solo, and his studio solo is a great example. You can find a full analysis of his solo here.

This set of exercises is intended to give you a feel for playing over a relatively simple set of chord changes with a visualization method that is boiled down to its simplest essence. There is, of course, much more to explore in this space.

Two very useful ideas to practice are call and response and theme and variations. Call and response is the idea of playing one phrase and thinking of it as asking a question. And then following that phrase with a second phrase that responds with an answer. You can make a phrase sound more like a question by ending it on a note that isn’t in the chord being played. This little bit of dissonance creates a slight tension that wants to be resolved. You can resolve the tension in your response phrase by landing on a chord tone. Landing on the root will feel like putting a period at the end of a sentence. Landing on the 3rd or 5th is slightly less final, but all three notes will work well for this. You have all the knowledge you need to begin experimenting with this.

Theme and variations is a similar idea in which you start by playing a phrase, and then you play follow-on phrases that are very similar but differ in various ways. In the YouTube video, I demonstrate landing on each note of the F chord, as well as landing on F notes in three different positions. Both of those demonstrations illustrated theme and variation. You can also create variations by changing articulations, changing positions within the scale, changing the rhythm, or mixing up just about anything else you can think of.

If you found this lesson useful but perhaps a bit much to absorb all at once, or if you want to keep following this method and go deeper, check out the full Improv 101 course. It consists of 8 step-by-step modules, starting with a gentler learning curve than this lesson but also going quite far beyond it. It’s virtually everything I’ve ever learned about improvisation all in one place, and I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

Happy jamming!