Lessons: A Year Later

In my last post, I said I would go into a little detail about what I'm working on with the looper pedal. To start, I have to talk a little about the guitar lessons I took last year.

I took lessons for about four months, going every other week, and then I stopped (just about a year ago) when work and life got busy to the point that I wasn't able to give the lessons proper attention. I didn't stop because it wasn't helping - quite the contrary, it helped a tremendous amount - but he gave me so much, so fast, that I couldn't even begin to process it all in the two weeks between lessons.

I knew then, and I know now, that what he was giving me was the road-map to being a competent guitar player. He told me I had to burn in the five positions of the minor pentatonic scale, going up and down the fretboard.  And in every key - though that's not that difficult, once you learn it in one position, you just shift the position to play in another key.

Then there's the minor scale - again, in all five positions, and in every key. And then the major versions of these minor scales (though there's a trick - they're the same thing.)

Soloing and improvisation are based on these scales, and I've continued practicing them. So now with a looper, I can play a chord progression in D major, or A minor, or whatever, and practice improvising over that progression. I can play around with the different positions of the appropriate scales, and try to play something that actually sounds like improvisation, and not just like playing scales.

I think I'm at the point now where I've finally internalized what my teacher was giving me a year ago. And I've barely scratched the surface.