No Fear

How does Bob Marley like his doughnuts? With jammin'.

Right, having thus established the baseline for this month's post, things can only improve...

I've been pushing improvisation as big deal with by late-beginner early-intermediate students a lot so far this year, and there's a strong reason why. Thinking back to the early stages of my journey as a guitarist, it really was at first a case of following the tab (bought from a guitar magazine – no internets back in the 90's) and trying to get it to sound vaguely like the song. If I didn't know the song, it was a case of searching for it on cassette (and for those of you young enough to think cassettes are retro-cool, I was there and they were NOT, awful things) or just guessing. At this stage I wasn't really a musician because I had no understanding of what I was doing, I was just following what the book or magazine said.

However, curiosity would periodically get the better of me, and I would take a chord sequence and try putting them in a different order, take a riff I 'd learned (or thought I'd learned) and change the rhythm, fiddle with the chords and find suspensions (not that I knew what they were at that point) – change things around a little to come up with something that was at least partly original.

Motivated by the fact that I found stuff I liked the sound of, I started noticing patterns in the tabs I was trying to pick out – things like the faithful minor pentatonic, and how it would move around the fretboard to match the key of the song (not that I really understood what that was at this point). And I started to try learning the solos – the first one I really got stuck into was “Live Forever” by Oasis, Noel Gallagher's soaring major pentatonic phrases seemed enticingly close but frustratingly out of reach. So I would try and play his solo, and I'd fail. So I'd make a rough stab at making one up using similar notes (which I would later come to realise was the G major pentatonic, although at that point I hadn't really grasped how E minor and G major pentatonic were the same thing seen from different angles).

Here's the thing though – by making up my own solo, I started getting better. MUCH better. Jamming along to first Oasis and Nirvana, then discovering the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin the Eagles Hendrix, Guns 'n' Roses – I began to get a feel for how to use the simple minor and major pentatonic patterns. I discovered the three-frets-back hack (and subsequently had it confirmed by a guitar magazine article). I discovered that even if I couldn't match a Slash solo note for note (and I couldn't), I could still fill the space with something that sounded OK. I developed an intuitive feel for rhythm. I got good enough, in fact, to be accepted for the Access To Music course within 18 months of getting started – and from there, things would never be the same again.

But what got me started? Jamming along. Making mistakes and gradually figuring out ways not to make them again. Taking the riffs and licks of my heroes and bastardising them to match my ability level. What is heartbreaking and frustrating for me as a teacher now is to see students who can't or won't make the leap to just playing, who forget that the process of an instrument is a learning curve- which by definition involves making mistakes because those mistakes themselves are an essential part of the learning process.

So if you're sitting there listening to a song and thinking “I'd love to be able to play that”, then just try – there are only twelve notes, pick a start note that sounds about right and slap a pentatonic pattern across it. You may have to tweak some notes, avoid some others, but it gets you started and that's what's so crucial.

So till next month, good luck and happy jamming!