I think that I am finally ready to depart from technical arpeggio soloing into a new era of soloing by ear. From this point forward I am going to try much harder to do some transcribing and trying to excercise my ear.
I think every guitar player should go through this phase where they need to build a basic vocabulary first before they try to put together fancy words with it. I spent the last year seriously focusing on learning arpeggios and patterns and soloing with these tools.
Everyone knows that this isn’t the real way to play guitar. Sadly, most guitar teacher will tell you from the beginning to learn to play by ear without allowing you, as a student, to develop a platform from which to grow from. Don’t let people talk you into skipping this process. I think its important to delve into it but its also important to know when to come up for air.
From this point forward its time to start transcribing. I am going to start by re-memorizing 2 Minor Swing solos from transcriptions. After that I am going to re-memorize “la Gitane”. When I have finished those tasks I am going to start transcribing and I will probably start with Si Tu Savais in Bm and Cm because its a song I really like. After that I think I want to learn an I’ll See You In My Dreams solo, being inspired by hearing Stephane Wrembel play it once.
-Jon