Why PLAYING LESS Can Make You Sound BETTER - P470

Introduction

In this episode, Lee explains why playing fewer notes can make your blues solos sound stronger, clearer, and more musical.

The goal is not to avoid notes. The goal is to make better choices, target stronger notes, and build phrases that actually communicate.

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Podcast:

What You'll Learn

Why adding more notes often makes solos sound cluttered
How great players edit their ideas
Why chord tones create stronger musical direction
How vocal melodies can teach better phrasing
Why clarity matters more than speed
How to practice playing less with more intention

Why More Notes Can Weaken Your Solos

Many players try to solve soloing problems by adding more scales, more licks, and more notes. But more information does not automatically create better music.

When every note gets treated as equally important, the strong notes get buried and the solo starts to lose direction.

Great Players Are Great Editors

The best players often know many of the same scales and patterns you already know. The difference is how they choose what to leave out.

They emphasize tension, release, chord tones, and phrasing. They are not trying to play everything they know every time they solo.

Build Phrases Around Important Notes

A stronger solo starts with knowing where you are going. Instead of beginning with a scale pattern, start with a destination note.

Chord tones, vocal melody notes, and strong resolutions give your phrases a clear target. Once you know the destination, the surrounding notes become easier to shape musically.

Practice Assignment

Choose a simple 12-bar blues progression.
Create a short phrase using only a few notes.
Pick one strong chord tone as your destination note.
Leave space between phrases.
Record yourself and listen for clarity.
Repeat the phrase with fewer notes and more intention.

Continue Your Training

Related Lessons

Transcript

Welcome friends to the Play Guitar Podcast. I'm Lee and I'm here to help you become the guitar player that you always wanted to be.

We're getting close to the end of this series on the blues phrasing stuff. I've got a couple really good lick episodes for you coming up, and then we got some really fun, fun, fun practicing things coming probably starting the beginning of next month.

But today we're talking about a belief that quietly holds a lot of players back. It's the idea that sounding better means playing more. And I just did a whole video about that. I did three different licks and there's two parts to each of them. The first part was pentatonic and lots of notes, and the second one is about half the notes and targeting, making sure that the notes mean something other than just going up and down the scale.

In reality, that kind of mindset of just playing tons and tons of things and trying to stuff as many notes, as many scales as possible, gets your solos cluttered. It's almost the opposite of what you think it's going to do. It's weak. The phrasing is non-existent and it gets frustrating to listen to sometimes too.

So let's explore today why playing less can actually make you sound far better. And this is a big discovery that I had about halfway through my journey with the guitar. The first part was just trying to get in the game, right? Trying to be able to play something that worked. And then as we moved on, I started playing different styles of music and learning from them.

So let's talk about the beginning of it. Why do you add too much in the beginning? You don't realize it's happening. That's why it's worth talking about. A lot of people have a learning addiction.

Me, I like learning, right? But many players constantly start looking for the next thing, the next breakthrough, the next scale that's going to make them feel better. It's going to make them think, now I'm really getting it going on. So every time you learn a new scale or a new chord, you get that feeling that you made a little bit of progress. And you did. It's addictive, right? So every new lick becomes a solution.

And the problem is over time, you stop working the scales that you've learned and you just want to keep learning more or keep practicing them going up and down. You become a scale collector.

Sound familiar to anybody? I know a few people that are scale collectors. They're probably listening right now. Scale collecting. So you're piling in information. You're hoarding all this information. A lot of people go around and get all the free stuff from all the different guitar teachers, and they put them on their hard drive and they can go back and take a look at them. And I guarantee you, you don't look at a lot of them. Maybe every once in a while you search for something, but just knowing that it's there feels good.

And then the information starts to pile up. And you've got all this knowledge stored and it grows faster than you can apply it. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to apply information. It's not enough to understand how something works. You have to be able to play it too.

You can get it and not be able to play it. I did that for years with jazz. When I was in school for jazz, I took all the courses. I had the instructor. I could play a little bit. I enjoyed it. But when I'd see a real player play, I knew what he was doing or she was doing. I could tell what was going on. But could I do that? No. Why? Because I didn't apply the things that I've learned.

So your solos become crowded. They get crowded with disconnected ideas. Right. Okay. Well, I'm going to just stuff everything I know into eight measures. Right. What's the truth about it? Accumulating these things isn't growing.

Just because you have more material doesn't make you a better musician. You're just exposed to it. But what you do with it from that point on is the key.

Think about that pile of information that you have, that you've screen grabbed, and all the different free things that you've downloaded. Think about what would happen if you tried to apply all of them right now. It's too much. Right. We got to focus in on something. We got to be able to say, okay, what's the most important thing to focus in on? I'm going to spend a little time with that so I can apply it.

Great solos are not built from quantity. They're built from quality. Musicality, being able to sound good, comes from being selective in some decisions that you have to make. Nobody wants to make decisions. I just want to play. I don't want to think.

I don't want to think about this stuff. Right. It's funny. You have to think all day long. It's time to play music. It's time to not think anymore. A little bit of thinking goes a long way with this stuff.

So point number two. What do the greats do?

I've observed the greats. I played with a few of them. I studied what they do. And most of the time, they're not doing anything that I don't already know.

Think about it. Think about your favorite players. Are they playing anything that you don't know? Is it a scale that you've never played before? If it is, that's easy. Go and learn it. What are the scales that that player plays? Get them under your fingers.

But that's not far enough.

What they do is they edit.

They're great editors. They leave a lot of things out. They don't have to play everything that they know every single time.

I know when I'm playing, I'm looking for the gem. I'm looking for the one lick that defines the song at that point.

These great players remove a lot of unnecessary notes.

But the problem with that is most players never prioritize this thing. They always feel that everything is equally important. All the notes, the strong notes, the weak notes, the wrong notes, they all get equal importance and the strong notes get buried. The solos start to lose direction.

So the truth of this is that these players emphasize what matters. And if you look at this week's lesson, it's three licks, two parts each. The first one is too busy with pentatonic scales. And the second one is half the notes, but with targeting, paying attention to the strong notes and weak notes. And what does that do? You'll hear it when you play them. It emphasizes what matters.

Tension and release. What are the things that listeners respond to? That's what the greats play.

Listen to Eric Johnson. Eric Johnson plays a lot of notes, tons of notes. Listen to the beginning, the little solo before Cliffs of Dover starts. There's tension and release throughout that entire solo. Even though he's playing fast, he's got strategic ideas about each section of that solo that take your ear along on the ride.

If we just played scales up and down, we tune out. It's not just scales up and down. There are arpeggios, there are strong notes. There are sections that lead into other sections.

So certain notes carry more weight, right? Certain phrases communicate more clearly. And the best players highlight those in their own playing.

Okay. So that's all well and good. Thanks for letting me know that, Lee. So here I am. I get it. I'm not where I need to be yet. You helped me with that, but here I am. Well, how do you do this? How do you get better? How do you develop better selection?

Well, one of the things you can do is identify the notes that define the song that you're playing. One of the things you can do is try to learn the vocal melody. If it's a vocal song that's playing in the song, try and figure out what the singer is singing on the guitar. Figure out what those notes are.

If you ever notice, if you ever tried to do this, if you ever tried to learn a vocal melody, they're usually not very complicated.

A guitar solo is much more complicated than a vocal melody, right? Vocal melodies usually stay in the same place, in the same octave. They usually go back and forth between two or three notes. They embellish them. They swoop into them. All those things that we do with the guitar, but they have a strong sense of strong notes and weak notes.

This is one of the things that guitar solos sometimes avoid, right? They look for the notes that define the sound of the chord that's playing at the time. The chords that are playing are a map to greatness.

If you could understand the notes that are in the chords as they go by, and it's not that hard to do, it takes a little bit of time, a little bit of thought, but they don't change. A C7 is always a C7. It's always got a B-flat in it, right?

You can learn where the strongest resolutions occur.

Here's what I like, and I like teaching this as well too, taking the strong notes of one chord and connecting them to the next ones of the next chord. And there's different ways that really great melodies use to connect the strong notes from one chord to the next. They don't have to use the weak notes. They can actually shift in from strong note to strong note. And I teach that, and it's a light bulb moment for most of the people who go through that part of my coaching.

But let's see here. We're going to notice the notes and we're going to find the ones that pull. Do you ever feel like you hear something and it's pulling your ear in a certain direction?

The problem is that players build solos around just patterns.

It's visual. We have a visual instrument. Our fingers take over, right? The shapes that we're playing, they're what we base our opinion of what needs to happen on a shape.

But the shape isn't what people are listening to. Nobody knows that your D chord looks like a triangle.

No one in the audience knows that, or no one at home who's listening to you knows that. That triangle means nothing to them. What does it sound like? So we know we have to play a triangle shape. I got to know what it sounds like because that's the part of it that's communicating.

So the truth of it is build your phrases around the important notes. Know what the destination is first. Start with the destination. You won't get lost. Then you can walk away a little bit, take a look at the forest, look around and say, I got to get back to home base.

There is a meaningful progression there. Right. So then we can start to connect things.

We can start to connect ideas to these notes. So the singer may have gone up, swooped up into a note. Well, you could mimic that using your strong notes and weak notes in that same area right there. Then it's going to actually mean something. It's going to remind the listener of what the melody did.

The melody is gold. You can't go wrong if you play the melody of the song with the singer. You can't go wrong if you build your solo around what they did. Maybe not play exactly the same. It's going to sound like it fits 100% of the time, connecting those ideas to the meaningful notes.

So I don't measure my success by how many notes I can play. Sometimes I play a lot of notes, but it's for a reason. I measure my success with clarity. Did this sound clear? Did I communicate what I'm trying to get across? Am I building up to the next section? Or am I calming things down from what happened before me?

Clarity. That's what we're looking for. A simple idea can communicate and people will think you're amazing. I can't believe you made me feel that way through that piece of music that you played. Or, man, you played a lot of notes.

See where I'm getting at there?

So, well, it's an interesting topic and it's a universal one. And it's not something that people say, hey, you know, I think I'm playing a lot of notes. I'm going to look this up today. It's not something people search for. But it's a person like me who's helping a lot of different people, and I'm starting to see a universal problem.

So what do you do? You can help me out with this. How do you get people to enjoy watching content that's actually helping them?

Well, I guess you got to frame the problem, right? What's the problem? The problem is your solos don't sound as good as you would like them to. Well, why not? Well, maybe the rhythm's off or maybe they just sound aimless. These are the things I hear a lot, right? Paying attention to the chord tones and playing slower and making sure that, I mean, think about it, right? Would you rather play a solo that makes sense or a solo that doesn't?

It could be flashy and not make sense, or it could be slower, something that maybe you can handle that's not at the top of your capabilities. I mean, does everything that you play have to be at the top of your capabilities?

No. You don't have to play the best you play all the time. In fact, in a solo, and I mentioned this last week, not all of my licks are fantastic at all. Some of them are meant to connect one lick to another or build to another. I have a couple of licks that are just plain, but they need to be there to set up the good one that I have planned for you. You see where I'm going with this?

So take a look at this week's lesson, those three licks. Play the first part and the second part. The first part's not bad. Each one of those licks at the end plays the root note of the chord that's playing at the time. They have a definite ending to them. So they're okay.

But then play the next one. You're going to find on the second set of each of the licks, this little phrase takes you away from your scale patterns.

It's starting to add other notes in that may not be in your minor pentatonic scale. It's going to take you outside of what you're used to playing, but it will sound good. It will match. And the first thing you think is, well, why am I playing this scale if not all the notes match?

Well, then you're never going to play a scale where all the notes match. That's not the point of a scale. A scale is a family of notes. A scale is a collection of strong and weak notes that across a chord progression may change. The strong notes and the weak notes may be different depending on the chord that's playing. Right.

So anyway, I'm going to start to wrap it up here. I've got a few students who are right where we are talking today. This is right. These are the things that they need to hear right now. Focus. Slow down. Pay attention. You can always speed up later once you understand what's going on, but play something that's nice with a few notes that works really good before you start throwing in all of those other things.

Okay. All right. So in the next few weeks, I've got one or two more of these lick lessons, then we're going to be moving into something new, pretty exciting for me as well too. And that is the videos and the podcast as well too.

I'm going to start helping you practice. I'm going to start taking a big shift towards practicing and giving you some ideas for your weekly practice.

This one week, it could be approaching scales a certain way. The next week could be making sure you understand how your songs work. Another one could be new chords or different inversions of chords that you may know. So it's going to be different every time, and every month I'm going to hit all four of the things, which is the scales, the chords, improv, and songs. All the things that we need to do. And I'm just going to give you a little tip or a little something for you to add to your practice then.

And then if you like to go further with it, these will be all related to the things that we do in the courses and then also in the Academy, which is going to become kind of a training dojo very soon. So you'd say, oh, I like this scale or this sequence, whatever it'll be that week. And if you wanted more, I'll have more for you as a member too. So that way everything is going to be contained.

The YouTube videos, the podcast, all the Academy things that we're doing, they're all going to be on the same plane. They're all going to be working together. So I'm really excited about that. I'm putting all of it together right now. And I can't wait to hear what you think about it when we make that shift in a few weeks.

But today, if today's episode resonated with you, start to pay attention. How often are you trying to solve a problem by shoving more notes at it? Sometimes the fastest path forward is not doing that. It's removing some things.

Take a look at the companion lesson with the three practical examples of the blues licks that become stronger and more expressive the second time when I simplified them. And remember that great playing isn't about how much you say. It's about making every single note count.

I'll see you next time. I enjoyed our time together and big things ahead. I'll see you soon. Bye bye everybody.

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