'Free-hand' jam-like solos: Why are they so elusive?

[William Johnson]

Is it a long road for most everyone, to turn the corner on 'self-made' soloing? I have a few licks tucked away, know the common major scales (using mostly A+B) and work on blocking exercises daily, etc. but have trouble tying all together in a flowing manner. What is a good way to get beyond this corner, other than keeping practicing what I am already doing? I need to locate some good rhythm tracks to play with . . .

Is this a common obstacle for most players? I have been too content too long, at the level I am playing at, so I plan on changing that a notch or two anyway.

Thanks,

billy

[Mark van Allen]

William, this may sound simplistic, but since what you're talking about is achieving the ability to play what you hear in a jam environment, I suggest practicing exactly that... sit down with a song or chord progression and sing a lick or line you wish you could play... and slowly find it, working it out in as many positions as possible.
Simple horn-line style licks over a 12 bar progression are a good starting point.

[Edward Meisse]

Megadittos.

[Clete Ritta]

One often used trick in bebop type solos is altering the scale by adding passing tones. By toggling between the minor and major 3rd, adding the tritone augmented 4th, the minor and major 6ths and 7ths. These in between notes enable you to go from one key or phrase to the next. Lets say youre playing in C but going to F. The C scale has a major 7th (B). But by simply flatting the 7th you are now in F. Often a solo will outline the progression and lead into the next chord. Could be why they are called leads, I dont know.

Playing the melody is not improvising a solo. Its good to be able to play the melody, but also to come up with your own improvisation when appropriate.
One thing I like to practice is going from one scale to another and back. Major to minor is a simple example. Ive got a lot more skill with modes on a 6 string guitar but, like you, I am struggling with the tonebar on pedal steel!
Buddy Emmons has a few charts which outline his "pockets" so to speak, and they are worth looking at to see how he does this tying together so effortlessly.
Im self taught on piano, and much was learned by ear from things I already knew on guitar. Hunt and peck mode Like previously posted, get a solo in your head, and if you can sing it, you can hunt and peck on the PSG in the same manner. Dissecting good solos you are already familiar with is also a good place to start.

Clete

[Dave Hopping]

The best learning tool for me was to cop other players' solos.Even when a solo is from a commercial tune,there is always some little piece of technique or a sequence of notes that'll get you thinking creatively and you'll start coming up with some ideas.
It's like a private lesson from that player-and all the players that influenced him.
In that connection,there's a thread titled "Papa John Hughey" in the "Gone Home" forum with a couple of vids of John playing.VERY much worth watching!

[CrowBear Schmitt]

Clete has some very good pointers William
may i suggest learning where the "pivots" are
that's where you link/tie/weave scales/runs together horizontally
Buddy's pockets for example
some are found in logical, common positions
it's the odd ones that are the most interesting : "out of the box"
i've learned from the fo'bro's here, that often, when playing fast, no matter how complex, a steeler is'nt going to use complicated/difficult/unpractical moves but rather positions that all fall into place for weaving the solo/run/lick

[Bo Borland]

Listening to other players on steel, sax, clarinet..etc is a great way to get melody ideas. Becoming familiar with the neck is most important.
While you don't have to know the names of each of the notes, you do have to know what note is produced.

[William Johnson]

Thanks for the suggestions, and off I go . . . again . . .

billy

[Jeremy Craft]

I've been playing six string for nigh on twenty years now. I've been playing PSG seriously for about one year. I am a much better soloist on PSG than on guitar for one simple reason: on six string, I play mostly for myself, by myself, and on PSG, I play in bands with other musicians that make me take solos.

Play with people, especially before you know what you're doing, and you will learn much more quickly than by practicing by itself.

Practice is useful for figuring out how to make the sounds you imagine, but when you play with others, you HAVE to figure out what to do right then and there. My understanding of the instrument has never advanced so quickly as when I have a band on stage with me, expecting me to sound competent.

[Christopher Woitach]

William

This is something I posted before - I teach improvising jazz at a college in Oregon, and this is a concept I've used quite a bit, both in teaching and in my own playing:

Scales, arpeggios, etc, are important, as materials - but what to do them? How do you make melodies "on the fly" that aren't just hand habits, or licks out of context?

The simplest, and non-genre-specific way to use all the material you've practiced is motivic development, in my opinion.

What is a motif? Quick-n-dirty: a short musical phrase that serves as a basis for melodic development

Here are some basic approaches (start with a 3 or 4 note phrase, one with some rhythmic interest - easier to manipulate than a longer one):

1. Silence - without holes, anything you play has no rhythmic or melodic context
2. Repetition - repeat your motif exactly, with space between repetitions, a few times
3. Sequence - Quick-n-dirty: same motif, different pitches, played as a pattern using the prevailing scale. Ex - if your motif is C E G A, and the prevailing scale is C Major, you could play the following sequence - C E G A, D F A B, E G B C using the same rhythm as your basic motif. This is just an example, and what you choose will depend on the specific harmonic situation. This doesn't have to be in scalar order, it could move around much more
3. Augmentation - motif with longer rhythmic values, motif slower
4. Diminuation - motif with shorter rhythmic values, motif faster
5. Retrograde - motif backwards
6. Q & A or Call/Response - play motif, answer it, play motif answer it differently... Blues uses lots of this technique
7. Fragments - use part of your motif, perhaps as a sequence
8. Rhythmic displacement - WHERE you play your idea - move it to a different part of the measure
9. Articulation - HOW you play your idea - slides, harmonics, damped...

This all might sound like a lot to think about - it's stuff to practice until it becomes natural to you. Nobody says "now I think I'll play some retrograde diminuation over my motif" during their solos, it's just something you play around with until it's part of your arsenal of concepts..

There are plenty of great players who play this way - in the jazz world Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, Jim Hall are good examples of motivic players. I'm sure, if you listen with this in mind, you'll hear lots of this stuff in whatever music you listen to, during the improvisations.

Hope this helps... sorry so long winded

[William Johnson]

Great advice. It makes sense. I'll practice with these thoughts in mind.

Thanks,
billy

[Ken Metcalf]

Band in a box is a help also.
I can sit down hit juke box and it will run through at set of tracks one after another.
So in an hour or less I go through a bunch of stuff.

[Jim Cohen]

Christopher, that's a great list. Thanks for posting that.
J.

[David Ellison]

I think the idea is to build up a small core of licks, and turn that into a musical "vocabulary." Learn licks that lead from chord to chord, then practice twisting and turning those licks to fit different songs. It's just like a baby learning to speak, he learns a few words first, then starts talking.

When I started in a band, I really knew only a few basic moves. I was only using the A and B pedals and the Eb lever, but I knew some basic ways to lead from chord to chord that I'd learned from records. Once you have some basics down, you can build on that... but even with just a basic knowledge and technique, you can sound like a good steel player, IMO. Playing with other musicians will force you to take what you know and make it work in different situations.

[Mike Pace]

Billy,

I get in the same rut every now and then with my current "bag of tricks" and one exercise I find helpful: pick a comfortable lick and figure out how to do it both "across" the neck and "up and down" the neck.

I'll second Jim's nod to Christopher's itinerary. There's some really good advice there especially with how to develop a motif.

Also, when it comes to extended, meandering, improvised jams, your relative Dorian and Mixolydian modes provide a real good "launch pad" for your phrasing~ when used against the relative major, those two modes can make a "statement" sound like a "question", and once you get going you're basically having a "conversation" with yourself!

As far as material to play with goes, I hear that Bob Hoffnar made some good "drone" CDs. Band in the Box has always been a reliable program, and most recently I was turned on the the "Real B" app for the iphone, which is just as cheezy as BIAB, but portable....

all the best,
-Mike

[Pete Burak]

...I have a few licks tucked away, know the common major scales (using mostly A+B) and work on blocking exercises daily, etc. but have trouble tying all together in a flowing manner...

One thing you can do is play along with some New Riders songs.
There are several full length cuts available here. Click on Panama Red and go to town for a few.
[Click on the Speaker icon to Listen]
http://www.nrpsmusic.com/music/index.html

[Jeff Watson]

The most helpful hint I ever heard from a musician as applied to my early struggles at improvising/soloing, was Eric Clapton saying all his "conscious" effort went into the intros (and outro) of his solos. Once I learned to use a couple of "pick up notes" or a short run to launch a solo, it would then kinda take on a life of its own or I could "hear" where it wanted to go from there.

[David Mason]

Christopher Woitach's list is great - there are several years work in there. But those are building blocks, not the house. To me, a solo that "hangs together" is one which takes you from one place to another, and the best ones seem to have the cooperation of the entire band, at least in intent. If you listen to the Allman Brother recordings available both before and after the "Live at the Fillmore" album, you can hear Duane Allman building up a solo over months at a time. Because the Grateful Dead recorded all their shows, there's even better evidence of Jerry Garcia constructing a "piece" out of "Dark Star", China Cat Sunflower" and such. sugarmegs.org is the place you can research such things:
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/

(I listen to this stuff while working, unless you're a real fanatic you don't have to sit through ALL the "Sugar Magnolia's" )

It's no big secret that Duane Allman and Jerry Garcia rehearsed their bands pretty hard, at least in the beginning - while there was plenty of exploratory meandering, there were also set cues to get in-and-out of places. As far as true "jamming" in terms of collective group improvisation, you almost have to go over to the jazz bands, or later rock music when some of the performers were more used to the idea. There are many places in first-edition Mahavishnu Orchestra recordings where they enter into music that they've never played before and will never play again*, Wolfgang's Vault has an amazing collection of the best Mahavishnu recordings:
http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/mahavishnu-orchestra/

Wolfgang's switches up what's available from time to time, it looks like the current list is ALL from the "glory months" of late 1972 to early 1973, before they stopped speaking to each other. Miles Davis's bands were well known for a certain looseness in their playing, to me his mid-60's band with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Ron WIlliams is great for this. Players who know either each other, the songs, or both really well seem to be able to "jam" a bit better. A lot of the newer "jam bands" just play really long guitar solos, to my ear.

*(yes, some will say "thank god!" to this.)

In my way of thinking, a great solo, whether improvised or not, has some recognizable elements at the end that relate back to the beginning in a way that you can hear. It's usually a motif, but it can be a rhythmic grouping, scale choice, or something that binds the solo together. It's probably sacrilege to say it here, but even the use of a special effect like a wahwah pedal can work... in order to tie the end of your solo back to the start, you have to remember what you did at the beginning. In theory, your audience should remember too, though it's my feeling that "solos" have been removed from modern radio play because the TV-addled minds of modern listeners can't remember what just happened two minutes ago.

This is actually quite a big question, you know... the book "Thinking in Jazz" by Paul F. Berliner is a good starting place.

[S.M. Johnson]

If one were to sit down listening to, let's say, a popular olde Ray Price record, one with which you are atleast vaguley familiar with the melody, and play it over and over again, with breathing or refreshing space between each subsequent play.........
your mind is likely to start hearing in depth, the pattern of chord changes. After you've pulled together your first chorus, you can then continue on with some variations for a second and third chorus.
Hammering together SOMEONE ELSE"s riffs, will not really serve you in the long run. Real musicians can likely also tell when you chain together riffs from more than one famous steel player. Often they really don't blend.......to well.

[Tony Dingus]

try youtube and search for jazz piano lessons. You might find a lick or 2 there.

Tony

[mike nolan]

Tagging on to what David Mason said..... find a copy of the Jimi Hendrix "Stages" box set, if you can. It was a real eye opener for me because the 4 CDs cover 4 concerts over 4 years. I had always thought of Jimi as a real free improviser, but listening to this, Il found that the music was pretty worked out and locked down..... which is not a bad thing. It is easy to forget that "totally free" playing is the result of a lot of work on particular songs, progressions, etc.

here is a link to more info on the "Stages" set...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stages_(Ji ... rix_album)

Another eye opener is listening to Beatles sessions and out takes.... I have access to lots of this stuff through my buddy Will Lee of the Fab Faux..... listening to Paul play the same bass line for 12 hours or so helps you get over thinking that those guys were one-take geniuses....

We all have to do the seat time.

[Jason Hull]

Play with people, especially before you know what you're doing, and you will learn much more quickly than by practicing by itself.

Word! Playing with other musicians is the only way to actually "jam"!

[Pete Burak]

... Hammering together SOMEONE ELSE"s riffs, will not really serve you in the long run. Real musicians can likely also tell when you chain together riffs from more than one famous steel player. Often they really don't blend.......to well.

I'm not sure this is correct.
We have a guy up here who hammers together Jerry Byrd, Speedy West, and Billy Robinson licks, and everybody thinks he's great.

[Steve Lipsey]

Maybe there are kinds of "great"....the great *craft* of seamlessly blending other people's licks....and the great *art* of coming up with your own....(usually, but not always, after learning everyone elses' and then moving beyond)..I know I rely on other folks' licks much of the time (and not necessarily at a level of craft that I would like to achieve), and only sometimes, usually in the context of being stimulated by jamming with others, the music takes over and something new pops out....

[Dave Burr]

at Pete!