Jaden Kim breaks down three mistakes that tank improvisation: not knowing where you are on the fretboard within the scale, not understanding the chords you're soloing over, and not listening to your ear or the band. He walks through labeling scale degrees in pentatonic shapes and mapping chord tones to fix them.
Hi there, beautiful people. Let's talk about the three mistakes that you're probably making when you play guitar solos. When I fixed these three guitar sins, my playing really exploded into the next level. If you're on the journey seeking improvisational and compositional mastery on the guitar, you're in the right place. Hope to see you around. My name is JoJo. I went to jazz school on a full ride, and now I love to show people how to play guitar. Let's get into it. Mistake one, you do not maintain an awareness of where you are on the tunnel map at all times. There's going to be times for us to flow and just feel the music. But especially in our practice, it is so important that we start to develop this awareness of where exactly we are in the tonal octave. This is a huge one, guys, especially in your practice. As we start to perform, there are going to be some times where we're just going to be flowing. But in order to not have that flow be interrupted, we need to develop good habits. In our practice. Many of you guys are just pressing buttons on your guitar and getting sounds out, basically outlining some geometric shape with your fingers. This is not the way to improvisational mastery. Try applying tonal numbers or solfege to the shapes that you already know. So, for example, if I took my second position of my A minor pentatonic. So this is first position, like the regular one, right? So if we were to go start on C now, we could label this our one. I always label minor relative to six. So this shape that normally you guys would just go, right? Without thinking about it, you're able to label as 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 1, 2, 1, 6, 5, 3, 2, 1, 6, five, three, two, one. And just being able to do that right there is a humongous first step on this journey of always knowing where we are on the map. Remember, the question is never what key are we in? But always, where am I within the key? Mistake number two, you don't know the chord progression that you're playing over. Now, just like before, the goal is for this to be an intuitive process. But in our practice, it's important to be methodical, so when performance time does come, it can be intuitive. When I say know what the chord progression is, I don't just mean be able to tell me the root notes of each chord and the quality, but also to be able to name every single chord note within each chord and to have an awareness of which notes are changing and which notes are staying the Same between the chords. And so, for example, if I took a 1, 6, 2, 5 progression in the key of D here to be able to tell me the chord notes of the I chord are. And this is all relative to the tonal octave are 1, 3, 5, 7. This specific voicing I'm playing is 1, 5, 7, 3. Do you have that knowledge of that on hand? Of these are the exact notes that I'm playing if I'm gonna play my sixth chord. This voicing here, I have 6, 5, 1, and 3. And built up from the bottom up, our six chord is 6, 1, 3, 5. Our two chord built from the bottom up would be 2, 4, 6, 1. Can you see that? This specific voicing is 2, 6, 1, 4. And then there's a six again. And to have the knowledge that, oh, there's a six in the II chord and there's also a six in the VI chord. Do they share any other notes for the two chord? We have 2, 4, 6, 1. Oh, they also share note one. There's this I in the II chord. I'm playing II, 6, 1. There's also a I in the VI chord to have that knowledge. After the two, we have the five, right? Do note that the V chord is made up of notes 5, 7, 2, and 4. Well, between our 2 chord and our V chord, they share notes 2 and notes 4. This is what I mean when I say no, a chord progression. You got to understand exactly how each chord is composed within the tonal octave and how the relationships between those chords work, what notes they share and which notes they don't. Mistake number three. You are not listening. This is a bit cliche, but we really do have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Well, I know we have two hands. The concept's the same. One, pick a hand. There are two layers to this. One is not listening closely to your inner ear or your audiation, and two is not listening to the bandmates or just the music around you. Sometimes to play what we hear, we need to take a quiet, silent moment and see what arises organically. Only from that place can we really start to develop this ability to play by ear and play what we're hearing. Because if you're just stuck on these geometric patterns and shapes, you're never going to get there. Silence is a part of music. What are some other mistakes that I miss or that you see yourself or others making? Let me know in the comments. Many of these mistakes are addressed by a methodical, structured approach to learning music or how to improvise. And compose, giving each chord and chord progression its due diligence individually, in pairs, in larger groups. And if you're already practicing chords like this, then you're on your way to have a lot of these problems disappear for you naturally. Want a closer look at exactly how you can develop these skills? Click the link in my bio. I've got something really special for you guys. It's a PDF that takes you through a methodical, structured approach to how to learn chords, how to visualize the fretboard, and I think it's going to be really helpful for a lot of you. Completely free, by the way. Peace, y'. All, and subscribe if you enjoyed this video and you're interested in improving on your improvisational guitar journey.
