Plain Old Major Blues

Jack,

I have visions of you packing up the pick-up truck and moving to Nashville. Say hey to Steve Krenz for me.

All kidding aside, that was nice.

Phil

Thanks so much Tbone! I just got into following the chord changes around and adding a little climax over the V chord when I got back into playing a couple of months ago. I really like the way it sounds. I don't think I could ever go back to just playing one scale over a whole progression again.

Thanks Cunningr, I think it took about 3 hours to compose that.  I really didn't have to do too many takes to record it as I'd already been playing through most of it over and over as I was making it up.  I spend a lot longer trying to get a good play-through of even the simplest lessons in the book.  When I write something myself, well it's like duplicating your own signature versus trying to forge someone else's - it's the way you already do it so there's not much technical challenge in repeating it.

I thought your solo was a great start by the way - you've got some really creative ideas and I look forward to listening to your stuff as you progress!

And yeah those Southern gals

As far as writing a solo, I'll usually just set the rhythm track to loop so that it plays over and over continuously, then improvise over it and of course you come across some stuff that you like, so I'll just make note of that and the next time that part of the song plays, I'll try to remember what I played the previous time. So then I'll be improvising over 90% of it but have that one little part that stays the same, and kind of come up with a nice way to lead into that part, or something that sounds good after it, or maybe just come up with something neat for a completely different part of the song. And of course lots of changing my mind about that part I thought I liked but now I'm not so fond of it any more etc.

I don't know anything about Garage Band, but if it's just something you changed in that particular project (or song or whatever they call it) could you just start a new project and everything in the new one would be set to default? You could also go to Youtube and there are probably a lot of tutorials on how to do different things, I find those pretty helpful. Or the good ol' Google search which I usually end up repeating until I stumble across the right term that brings up something that actually pertains to what I'm interested in.

Yeah if you're just improvising over a track then every one is going to be different and of course you'll have to decide which you like best, but I assumed you were sort of working on creating a single solo because you said the tracks were similar - but I was probably completely wrong with that assumption I haven't really recorded myself improvising because I'd end up with one cool part and the rest of it I wouldn't be happy with. If I were going to do that I'd probably copy-and-paste the backing track 10 times in a row in Reaper (come to think of it, I actually don't know how to do that lol) but then I'd play along with it, getting nice and warmed up and getting in the groove; maybe coming up with something I'd be happy with. I should probably try that sometime and see what I come up with.

I was just improving, but seems like once it get something in my head it keeps coming out similar, but different.  In garage band you can just mute the tracks you don't want to hear, so you only need one backing track.