One of the ways to fight ‘patterns’ playing is to explore all the intervals you can find in a scale. It is a really easy concept you can apply to ANY scale. This is also a great exercise for your chops. Try to practice more with your ears than your fingers…enough said. If applied to soloing every interval has a specific ‘color’ or ‘sound’. Many styles are based around that color, just watch the video and you will understand.
Printable PDF: Scale in Intervals
Here I’ll show you how to put all the stuff you learnt so far, to create a simple solo on a backing track in G Major, with chords from the G major harmonized scale. This is the progression:
| G | C maj7 | Em | D | Am |
As you can see even if there are 5 chords, it’s all in the same key, and I would use phrases from these scales:
G major
G major pentatonic
G minor pentatonic/ blues scale (when you want to add that ‘bluesy’ sound)
Check out the solo at the end of the video for inspiration in case you are stuck for ideas, in this case I’d say just download the track and experiment.
Download MP3: >Backing track<