Moving From Practicing Scales To Making Melodies - 101

Are you stuck in practicing mode?

Do your solos sound like you are practicing scale patterns?

Today I unpack a very common problem to help a founding member of the academy.

Check out what Founding member Evan shared about his experience with guitar:

• Now that I know the basic parts, how do I start putting them together?
• To start with scale patterns, I practice them daily.  First as technique exercises and then as part of improv.  Some days I'll make my practice portion a kind of dive into scales, so I'm becoming more familiar with the fretboard.
• However, I feel like all I'm able to do with the scales are very rudimentary lead lines.  Small phrases of only a couple notes, a lot of meandering. So, while I've come up with some basic licks doing this, maybe that's what I really need: how to translate scales into more melodic licks and how to tie those together into leads.
• Right now I feel like I've got skills to do something, but only know how to apply to the most basic things.  And what I would hope for is a bit of direction as to where to go with these skills. I don't want to spin my wheels, I'm hoping to pin down what the next step on the path is, so that I know I'm not wasting my time on

On the podcast today, I go over the big three topics that have to be addressed before you can move forward with your lead playing to address some of Evan's points. They are:

1. Getting familiar with melody
2. Notes and rhythm choices in phrases and melodies
3. Learning to construct a solo

Check out this weeks podcast above and visit Play Guitar Academy to signup to be a ground floor member of the academy!