The gap.

First semester at music school. I’m 19.

A group of students was assembled on stage, to play Black Dog by Led Zeppelin — I was feckless enough that I hadn’t actually bothered to learn the solo as it was in the song. It got to the solo (what was I expecting?) and one of the teachers pointed at me and shouted:

I cringed.

I had no idea what to do. The band kept playing. All eyes were on me. The teacher looked at me, surprised, confused.

Desperate for an excuse.

In a mad rush, he unplugged the pedal, took the batteries out, ripped open a new pack, put the new batteries in, plugged the pedal back in, pointed at me and shouted:

The song ended like a wet fart.

I’m more embarrassed remembering it than I was living it. But I know plenty of people who’ve found themselves in a similar situation as adults — turning up to jams thinking they can play the guitar because they’d learned someone else’s songs note for note and being rudely awakened to the fact that their playing has quite narrow and very unforgiving boundaries.

There is a yawning chasm between someone who can play back a memorised piece of music and someone who can just… go — make something up on the spot that fits, and that sounds like them. But the truth is, it’s often a lot more rewarding and a lot more enjoyable than just regurgitating someone else’s music. It might seem like magic. It might seem impossibly hard. But it isn’t. You can learn to do it.

This site is about learning to improvise on the guitar. ‘Improvising’ can mean a lot of things — a jazz chord-melody, Hendrix-style rhythm and lead, a riff that turns into a song, the melodic noodling you hear throughout Brown Eyed Girl. But what my teacher was asking me to do in that moment was something more specific: play a solo. Play something melodic, over a chord progression, that serves as a kind of musical breakout, that I’d made up on the spot. That’s what this stage of the course is about.

The reason most guitarists never learn to improvise isn’t lack of talent, it’s that nobody ever showed them how. Without the how you can only copy.

If you think of music theory as the rules and laws of music, then the more you know, the more options you have — the more of what you come up with will comfortably live inside the realm of sound-combinations that please the ear. We’re going to learn little bits of theory as we go, but it’s all in service of becoming a better guitarist now.

We’re going to look at some solos. Learn them if you want. But not so that you can regurgitate them later. We’re learning them the way Hunter S. Thompson once typed out The Great Gatsby word for word — not to copy it, but to understand what it feels like to create something like that. To get inside the thinking.

Each solo is a case study. We’ll look at what the guitarist was reaching for, what tools they were drawing on, what theory sits behind the choices they made. And then we’ll use those tools ourselves, over the same progression, straight away.