Peter Edvinsson asked:

A fake book can really help you a lot in developing your improvisational skills. If you choose just one of the songs you will find a source to many exercises that will help you become a much better guitarist.

Do you know what a fake book is?

A fake book is made in a very compact format containing a lot of songs. This is possible because you will usually only find the melody of a song and the chords of a song.

The melody is written out with sheet music notation and maybe guitar tablature and if it is a song you can find the lyrics beneath the melody. The chords to play you will find above the notes.
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Because this is a compact way of writing down songs a fake book can contain more than 500 songs.

This very rudimentary way to write down the songs gives you as a guitarist an opportunity to use your own musical taste when you interpret the songs.

The songs will usually only contain very basic chord progressions. When you hear these songs played the songs are often spiced up with more interesting chords. Often there are also more chords used which will make the chord progressions more interesting and exciting musically.

The act of trying to find more chords to use in a song and to spice up existing chords is an excellent exercise in chord theory. As you are working with a song you are interested in and also will use the exercise in you actual guitar playing you will be more motivated to do a good job.

You can now practice the new chords in the song. Concentrate on one chord at a time. There are many ways to practice a chord by for example playing the chord in various positions and with different voicings.

You can now take the chord practice a step further by using your new chord progressions in the song and practice changing chords. Take a few bars of the song and practice to play the progressions on your guitar as you vary the chord voicings.

When you have decided which chords you will use in a song you can use these chords to find suitable scales to use in your guitar improvisation. You can find many scale books on the net with suggestions on which scale to use for various chord progressions.

We will use the first chord of the song you are working on to show how you can find out which scale to use. If your first chord is a C-major chord you can choose between for example a C-major scale or a C-major pentatonic scale. The principle is to find a scale that contains the notes in the chord.

Now it is time to actually practice playing the scales on your guitar. Start with the first chord in the song and continue the same way with the other chords. First, strum the chord on your guitar and practice playing the suitable scale up and down in various positions and patterns.

Actually it is very common that you can use the same scale to many chords in a song. For example, the C-major scale will work together with the chords C-major, G7, Dm, Am and so on.

Now when you have mastered playing the suitable scales to the chords you can start to work on improving your improvisational skills by taking the previous method a little bit further. Strum a chord and use the scale you have chosen to create your own patterns, melodies and licks.

You are now prepared to improvise over the chord progressions you have written down using the scales you have chosen. The exciting part is when you come to a bar with a new scale to use. If you find it hard to change scale during your improvisation it might be a good idea to concentrate working on this skill for a while.

That means, use two scales and try to alternate between them as you continue to improvise maybe a couple of bars over each scale.

You can use a song in many other ways developing your skills in guitar improvisation. This should of course be a positive exercise leading you towards the goal to be able to play the song from start to end with melody and improvisation as you would like to play it in public.

Learn Guitar

Ricky Sharples asked:


Sometimes trying to learn guitar is compared to learning a new language but this is really not true. You can’t start off learning a language with the shortest words or the funniest phrases but an easy way to learn guitar songs is by starting with the ones you most like and the songs with the simplest chords.

So what is the best way to get a collection of guitar songs to learn? There are plenty of books available for you to buy on line or at your local music store that contain anthologies of guitar songs belonging to a wide range of musical genres. The trick is to use your own tastes as a guide only – but not to make the final choice.

An anthology of folk songs containing numbers like Nine Hundred Miles, Where Have All The Flowers Gone?, Worried Man Blues, Little Boxes, Foggy Foggy Dew and Clementine may be too old fashioned for your musical tastes but the muscles responsible for changing chords aren’t going to know about that.

Collections of folk songs are compiled by guitar instructors who are following a plan of learning groups of chords over time using several songs. This enables a guitar student to get used to chord changes involving a definite number of chords before moving onto another group. For example the song This Land Is Your Land may not be one of your favorites but it’s a great way to learn the chords G, C and D.

If you start your collection of guitar songs with songs that you personally are fond of you may be making your progress as a guitar player more difficult than it needs to be. With a collection of easy folk guitar songs that have been chosen with the gradual introduction of the guitar to a student in mind, you have teaching material that will get you playing the songs you like in a short amount of time.

Using easy guitar songs in this way might diminish the enjoyment of learning the guitar a little but it won’t put unnecessary obstacles in your way. So you still get to have fun while you learn guitar without risking becoming disillusioned with yourself as potential guitar player.

If you can choose a collection of easy guitar songs, your learning experience will be much more enjoyable if you can then find on YouTube some free video clips of guitar players performing some of the songs you’ve chosen. Failing that you can look for audio of the songs to buy or borrow. Whatever you do is don’t belittle the collections of easy guitar songs that you see online or in the stores. They may not have lasting interest for you but they will help you to learn guitar.



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