Rolly Brown leads you through an organized approach to improvisation on the guitar. Starting with "Rolly's Rule", the notion that your guitar should recall aspects of the human voice, the lesson takes an interactive approach to exploring several different genres of musical improvisation, with Rolly playing instructive examples of these styles, then playing rhythm while you work through the exercises.

You'll learn:

• The one, two and three note solos
• Soloing over a Blues progression
• Playing over archetypal Major scale progressions
• How to use chord tones and passing tones
• Integrating Major and Blues scales to understand all 12 Tones
• Understanding the "Bluegrass Mode"
• Soloing over Jazz progressions

86 minutes - Level 2/3 - Tab/Music material is on the DVD as PDF files

Click here to download updated PDF files

Review: Here's an inspirational point of reference for newcomers: No matter how profound their superpowers of spontaneous invention, the Wes Montgomerys and Jerry Garcias of the world all started in the woodshed. Except neither one had National Fingerpicking Champion Rolly Brown to jump-start their earliest forays into "Improvisation." So long before "Four on Six" ever cooked with the coolest of heat, the fundamentals of on-the-fly firemaking had to be gathered. Here, that starts with daring audacity: the one-note solo. Perfect. Then progress to a two and a three note solo. What makes such simplicity work so well initially is the array of surrounding coloration, from pull-offs, hammer-ons, vibrato, staccato, bending, finger slides, note dynamics. The "cycle of fifths," approach notes, chord tones and arpeggiation later come into play too. But the lesson's overarching mantra is "phrasing," namely simulating the cadence of the human voice, where a note's emotional content is as vital as the note itself. To do so, Brown's instructional method relies on "An Interactive Approach." You first watch him get creative, step-by-step, atop a rhythm guitar track. Then it's your turn to take a crack at putting those demonstrations into play, as he lays down the same chord progressions for you. By learning how to solo over all sorts of progressions here - blues, major-scale, jazz, even bluegrass - you're set for whatever jam comes your way. You might not yet be quite up for sustaining a 30-minute "Dark Star," but Brown more than preps you with the basic concepts and inventive confidence to certainly begin chipping away at such a Herculean task. – Dennis Rozanski/Blues Rag