As an intermediate player, you will develop technique that must include noise control, and, depending on genre, some or all of of legato, picking every note, sweeping, left- and right-hand tapping, bends, slides (single note and double stops), vibrato, finger swaps, various types of harmonics, whammy bar. You should already know the major and natural minor scales, and the major and minor pentatonic scales. However, you may not know how to play these in any 12-fret block of the guitar neck. and you may not be used to playing horizontally along the strings. Knowing this gives much more freedom of expression. You should already know the major, minor and diminished triads, but you may not know their inversions. As you progress through the intermediate lessons, you will learn more scales and modes, and more chord types, and you will need to familiarise yourself with these on the neck. The ability to play in time, and target any beat or sub-division of the beat is essential, which you must practice. Practicing rhythmic “motifs” is really helpful for when you want to add more ear candy to your improvisation.

But what are you going to do with these scale notes to make them sound melodic, and to create emotions. Literally playing up and down parts of a scale won’t hack it, and shredding scales can gets very unsatisfactory to yourself and the listener. Then there is playing chord voicings cleanly, in time, on beats and subdivisons, for a proper groove. And practicing phrasing to structure a solo, or a section of a tune (or song).

These are some the aspects we’ll be covering.

On the note-choice front, we’ll cover practice ideas around scale-based motifs, intervallic motifs, and arpeggios.

We’ll start with motifs from scales.