Make Your Guitar Solos Sound Better By Playing The WRONG NOTES!
Does your improvising sound boring?
Is it causing you to receive complaints from neighbours?
Sure, they may knock on your door at two in the morning complaining that your guitar is "too loud", but deep down you know what they really want to say is that your over reliance on the first position of the minor pentatonic is evidence of a fundamental lack of melodic vocabulary and an inability to put the work in to fix it.
They don't think your playing is too loud, they think it's contrived and dull. But they're too nice to say it.
So what is there to do?
You might feel like a total master of the pentatonic, but when it comes to adding any notes outside of it, you're totally clueless.
It's like every note that isn't in the pentatonic is a little pit of lava that's going to swallow you whole if you don't return to the consonant utopia that is the first position of the minor pentatonic.
And hey, I get it. Playing outside the first pentatonic box is scary. There could be any number of ghouls and goblins out there in the dark recesses of the fretboard, and if you don't know how to navigate it properly, you could get snatched up.
But worry not, I'm here to make sure that probably won't happen to you.
The main issue people have with playing outside of the pentatonic box actually comes from the fact that they've spent too much time in the pentatonic box.
The issue is that every single note in the pentatonic sounds good, it sounds consonant. So you can play up and down the pentatonic with reckless abandon without worrying about resolving anything because there are no dissonant notes.
So when you start experimenting with dissonance, you're probably going to play the dissonant notes as if they're consonant, because that's the only type of note you've ever played.
That's why dissonant notes sound 'wrong' when you play them but beautiful when the pros play them!
Because they play them like dissonant notes — you play them like consonant notes.
So, a massive component of using dissonances better is just forcing yourself to get used to 'ugly' sounds until you learn what makes them work, and you learn how to treat them like the dissonances that they are.
On the other hand, this doesn't just comes from experience and from forcing yourself not to shy away from more dissonant sounds. Doing the wrong thing on purpose is not the same as doing the right thing!
Instead it's very important that you find some way of actually finding the right dissonant notes to play at the right time. They don't always work whenever you want, you have to know where to place them.
So if you want to know a few sure-fire methods to insert some dissonance into your playing, watch the video linked below and I'll explain everything to you there.
Want to know more about soloing, scales, and modes? Want to start coming up with way more interesting ideas by expanding your knowledge of the fretboard? Check out my Master of the Modes guitar course to start improving your scale knowledge right away!