STRUCTURING A SOLO

link to recorded example.
www.karlstraubmusic.com/Structuring a solo C-02.mp3

Here's an approach to organizing/planning a solo. Through the influences of Lee Konitz, Joe Pass, traditional fiddle tunes, and probably some other things as well, I've been practicing improvised eighth note lines. This is a common exercise for jazz musicians. You set a metronome at a slow or medium tempo, and play exclusively eighths as long as you can keep it up. This exercise pays huge dividends-- it builds your stamina, forces you to learn how to continue ideas, pushes you away from muscle-memory licks, etc. At some point I may do a post about this.

At any rate, after all the good things that happened to my playing, I eventually figured out there was a downside. The perpetual eighths approach often resulted in me having trouble ending ideas. It also makes it harder for me to put rests in my lines. These two problems are not always big negatives when I'm playing in a Lee Konitz or Tristano-esque jazz style (or trying to!) but they can suck the life out of country picking. This is because country guitar lines use rests as a big part of the idiom. It's also essential to be able to end an idea exactly where you want it to end, and I've found that this skill only gets developed if you think about it and work on it.

So I came up with this approach. It's a structural plan you can follow when you're improvising. If you are at the point where improvising is hard, then preplanning a solo following these guidelines would be a good exercise. I've broken my country lines into several categories.

FLOWING
this means mostly eighths, avoid rests. You could take this in a fiddletune/flatpicking direction, or think more melodically.

TREADING WATER
this means using a repetitive short riff idea, a very common country device.

CHOPPY
this means a bunch of short ideas, separated by rests, which add up to a longer idea.

BLUESY
this includes using dissonances called "blue notes", tension/resolution patterns involving blue notes, slurs, and other things that make up what I call "blues language."

BOOGIE
this means using the kinds of licks you hear on hillbilly boogie records, Hank Williams's bluesier material, a lot of records Grady Martin played on, etc.

ENDING
using a phrase that "sounds like an ending."

(I know a lot of my shorthand explanations here are vague! I hope to do later posts that flesh out these ideas.)

for the exercise, I put these approaches together in a specific order and then follow it in my solo. I usually do two bars for each one. This kind of method could be varied any way you want to-- leave out some of the styles, come up with your own, put them together in different orders, instead of two bars use some other phrase length, etc.

I use this order.
FLOWING
TREADING WATER
FLOWING
CHOPPY
BLUESY
BOOGIE
FLOWING
ENDING

I'm using the "Gregory Walker" chord progression, which goes back at least to the 16th century. These changes have been used countless times in countless pieces of music, and they make a good progression for exercises. (Thanks to picker Ira Gitlin for telling me this progression had a name!)

TECHNICAL TIPS FOR PLAYING MY EXAMPLE
there are some positions and fingerings here that may not be familiar to you. I tried to put some of it in open position, but some of these ideas sound less "country" to me when a more obvious fingering or position is used.

in bar 2, using the pinky to pull off from the fifth fret to the second gives this phrase a snap it wouldn't have if it was all in open position. (I think I stole this lick from Orrin Star-- if not the actual lick, I know he started me thinking about the idea of using awkward stretch fingerings in the open position to facilitate what he calls the "judicious" use of pulloffs and hammerons.) to get there, you need to play the F# with middle finger, G with ring.

In general, I'm shifting positions for each two bar idea. If you follow the tab exactly, it should be clear when you need to shift your hand.
for the "choppy" section, bar 8, I'm in 3rd position, and I reach down briefly with index finger to get to the C#.
You'll have to jump down to get the low F (bar 12) and then jump back to 3rd position.