Working with the pulse of the metronome or a loop, find the root position A minor pentatonic and play it up and down. Add some stops between your runs of the scale up and down. Try to make your stops last only an eighth note. Once this is comfortable, starting changing directions with every stop. This will add musicality to the exercise although it is not a solo quite yet. We will now add a repeating melodic cells of your choice, a good range is 2-5 notes. Finally, add some bends which will add expressiveness to our playing.

Lesson Summary

In this lesson we started our new solo technique. First, we played up and down the scale in the an area, in this case the root position of A minor pentatonic. The next step was to use the stops to signal a direction change, meaning a change of direction for every stop. After direction changes, we added repetitions and bends to make this sound even more musical.