STOP Running Out Of IDEAS When You Improvise Guitar Solos
I know a guitarist who can write a killer solo on paper. Compose it, revise it, polish it, no problem.
Hand him the guitar and ask him to improvise one on the spot, and something else happens.
His brain stops.
Not because he lacks the skill. He falls back on the same three or four licks every time, and he knows it. "It sounds very repetitive," he told me once, clearly unimpressed with himself.
If that sounds familiar, here's the part most guitarists get wrong about it: running dry of ideas mid-solo isn't a talent problem.
Creativity is a skill. Not a gift some guitarists are born with and others aren't.
I know how that sounds, like a line printed under a stock photo of a mountain somewhere. It isn't. The research backs it up, and more importantly, so does what happened next with this particular student.
I gave him one specific drill, right there with the guitar in his hands. No backing tracks, no extra gear, no scale book.
The first minute or so was easy. Then it got uncomfortable, which is usually right where guitarists give up on this kind of exercise.
That's also exactly where the useful ideas started showing up.
If you're the kind of player who never runs dry, who already has too many ideas and struggles to connect them into something that hangs together as a solo, this lesson isn't really built for you. That's a different problem.
But if you grab the guitar, go to improvise, and just blank, watch the video above and try the drill yourself. And if you want a deeper system for building solos that connect from note to note instead of stringing together isolated licks, Master of the Modes walks you through exactly that.
Video Transcription
Hello, Internet, so nice to see you. How do you get new ideas when you are improvising a solo? Now, there is something to be said that when you improvise a solo, having new ideas all the time may or may not be the right thing for you, because if every phrase you play is a new idea and you never elaborate or connect with other things, then your solo just doesn't sound like a solo, it just sounds like a lot of good, clever ideas strung together with no meaning. So there's that.
This is one of those situations where a YouTube video such as this one may or may not help you, because it depends what kind of player you are. So let me make this better for you. If you are the kind of player who has a lot of ideas and when you improvise that you always find I can play this, I can play this, I can play this, and the ideas pour out of you consistently, then this video is not for you. Study, get one of my other videos on how to connect ideas and how to create meaning in the solos.
But if you are the other kind of player that struggles in finding new ideas, you grab the guitar, you are about to improvise and you have no idea what to do, or everything you play sounds meh because you don't have any good ideas, then this is the video for you.
We have known for a very long time that creativity, it's a skill. Creativity is a skill. It's not something given from above, okay? It's not something magical, it's a skill and everybody, anybody can train their creativity and get much better at that.
People who are not creative, again, it's a skill issue, it's not a talent issue. What I'm showing today, and again, what I just said is not even controversial. The only people who dispute that are some posers on YouTube, okay? Just saying, okay? It is not even controversial, it's obvious.
Today, I'm going to show you one of those exercises to develop your creativity. If you do this exercise, you can become a fountain. You're going to become, if you do it consistently, you are going to become a fountain of ideas.
I'm going to give you a guitar and you're going to start pouring out new ideas, new melodies, new solos, new things all the time and they're all good. Again, not even controversial.
When I say the exercise, a student asked me how to do that. Here's my explanation. I've been in bands, I could write a solo, but in an improvising situation, I sort of run out of ideas and then I draw a blank. Okay.
I fall back on certain particular licks and it sounds very repetitive. Yes. Okay.
So, is there a key you're particularly comfortable in? Pick the easiest one for you. Trust me here, pick the easiest one for you. I guess E major, E minor.
Let's pick E minor because it's as good as... Okay, play me anything in E minor. Anything.
Good, good.
Now, what I'm going to do is this. The problem of running out of ideas is that at a certain point your brain just stops. Okay.
If you let your brain go, the normal natural state of your brain is a continuous state flow of creativity. Hard to believe, but that's what it is. Okay.
At a certain point you just stop. So we need to train your brain to not stop, to keep going. Okay. Okay.
This is a similar exercise to what graphic artists do when they're like... copy something from real life but never lift the pen or the pencil from the canvas. Just keep going and going and going. Never stop, never. Okay. And then they just draw something.
You're going to do the same right now for the guitar. So you're going to do this. You're going to play a continuous stream of eight notes. Okay. Okay.
Eight notes like one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one. That's kind of stuff. Okay. Make sense? Sure.
Never stop. Okay. No bends, no vibrato, no phrasing, no rests, no long notes, no short notes. Nothing. You can play whatever you want.
You can stay key, you can go out of key. You can never repeat yourself. You cannot go... You cannot do this. Okay. Right. Okay.
And I think it's lower than what I was doing. So you have more time to think. But the idea is never stop. Okay.
Anywhere on the fretboard? Anywhere. Okay. There's no other restriction. Okay. And I'm going to play a chord progression in minor. Okay.
But your speed is... Okay. Okay. So that is your speed. Do not change it.
Ready? Let's go.
So... That's it. So... So... So... So... So...
Okay. Very good. Very nice. Wow.
So now let's see what happened. Okay. The first four or five repetition, you just played a scale up and down. Right. Normal. Fine. You get it out of your system. Okay. Okay.
Then there was that moment where you started scrambling your brain, like, what do I do now? And then occasionally some good stuff came out. Right. Okay.
So here's the lesson for this exercise. If you do it for one minute, it's not enough. You need to keep going.
That is the first 30 seconds, a minute, which you're like, yeah, okay, I can do that. Then you pass it through a period of desperation, like, what do I do now? Okay.
Or a period of boredom. I'm doing the same thing over and over. There's nothing here. Good.
When you hit those negative feelings, okay, you just stick to it. Okay. The gold is on the other side. Okay. And there was some gold in there. Okay.
So the important point that you have to stick to it, five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Okay. 15 minutes is long. Okay. Makes sense.
Because the idea is that the boredom or the desperation, depending on what kind of person you are, it's a feature. It's what pushes you to do something different. Right.
If you just give up, like, okay, now this is boring. You're not getting the exercise. You need to go beyond that.
You may have noticed at a certain point, your mind went blank. Yes. Good. That's the good state to be, okay? That's the good state to be.
At that point, it just flows out. Okay. So let it go. Don't worry about the mistakes. Don't worry if it has a wrong note. Just let it go and ideas come out.
You do this once a day for five, 10 minutes, whatever. Once a day. Okay. A couple of months, you will not have your problem anymore.
Because if you start to relax into the thing, then you can play different things. And you know that if you just let it go, the ideas come out. Right. Okay. Okay.
You just kind of gain confidence in yourself. Right.
The problem of this exercise is that you need to know at least a scale. Otherwise, you don't go anywhere. Right. But it really, really works if you insist. Okay? Okay. Good.
Thank you. Thank you, Francesco. Thank you so much. Thank you.