A-ha's and BOOMS! LOVE THEM!

Lots of wisdom in this video

Great thoughts and ideas!  thank you for sharing those.  The last one is very important - you have to stretch and go for it to improve.  It is scary to leave your comfortable zone and take  chances, but you won't grow without doing that.  I experience this as a guitarist and a singer , not to mention in my actual profession as an orthodontist.  My teacher had me get up and play with his band (they were all seasoned pros) it was terrifying as I waited to get called up.  Felt like such a thrill after the show was over!

I enjoyed the intro and the dance... yes. All the topics are revelatory and the degrees of lifelong pursuit depth can be exponential if one wishes. Vibration, Time, Community, Pride and Grace. All of these are why music in positive ways can discipline us, free us, at times consume us. Thanks Thor!

Taking lessons from Stephane while playing in a Django style band 1-3x a week kicked my ass. I felt like there was some secret sauce that I was missing, that I was lacking, that I was non-creative. That forced me to learn my neck much better. Being forced to take solos on said gig after amazing players  (had to follow Gonzalo one time and I shat the bed) was awful. But I got incrementally better.  Stopping lessons and transcribing a little bit everyday opened my ears. Being told by one fella that I sounded like a dying battery on a gig forced me to use a metronome. Listening to drum solos and counting over it helped me. All good stuff. Not quitting also was the best.

Thank you Thor.

That was a master class on taste and tone on my personal favorite guitar, a Tele. Always enjoy your outlooks on music, guitars in particular, and life. Thanks for what you do.

What you said about the looper helping your time was definitely an aha for me too! Very different context but doing all those solo acoustic singing gigs at breweries and getting so bored, so i started looping the rhythm guitar as I sang a verse, so i could play a verse or two instrumentally. Mostly just to help drag out the songs ahha. But it really exposed my rushing habits when I sing and play at the same time. Great practice tool, less so of a performance tool. Still do plenty of looping gigs though. Great video once again, thanks Thor!

lol. I cannot believe I’ve never really thought about the tuning symmetry deal (at least not this specific symmetry) before you pointed it out here!

Really great advise! Very much appreciated 🙏🏽. Aha moment for me was when I learned to see the 3’s and 7’s of dominant chords moving horizontally up the neck. 🤯

I connect with all of these, but especially the last two. I've recently started playing with a friend of mine who's a much better guitarist than I - he has jazz and classical training. Instrumental duo - a combination of jazz standards, oddball covers, and semi-improvised pieces. We are planning to set up a show in a few months. The first song he suggested was "Alone Together." I assumed my role would be to comp and just support him soloing, so I got the shell chords down, practiced with a metronome, and came back feeling ready to do that. We start playing, it feels okay... then he starts playing rhythm and nods to me to take a solo. I was anti-guitar solo for many years (punk rock background) and while I appreciate a good solo nowadays, I'm still not super comfortable with lead playing. So when he nodded to me, my brain is going "shitshitshit" and I just start hitting notes, sort of in key but in a random, searching way. He has been patient and has encouraged me to be more confident and work with "out" notes and we are trading solos with a bit more fluidity now. It's actually sounding pretty good. I've been listening to a lot of Marc Ribot stuff lately and Ribot's example is inspiring me to take more chances. I've been playing at home along with backing tracks, deliberately pushing myself out of key, throwing weird timing things in, etc. to challenge myself to make it sound deliberate and find my way back home. Great fun.

Very nice intro ❤️🎸 Happily blues scale is more various than the p1 minor

My a-ha moments
1 - harmonizing the major scale the classical way, only with degrees I IV and V inversions. Not only it felt a lot more natural than the straight " jazz harmonization" IM7 IIm7 IIIm7 etc etc....but also lead me to get better at voice leading
and made my bassline better. Then I came back to the "jazz harmonization" again with fresh ideas.
2 - triads drop forms, that lead me to have a "keyboard player" approach.

Great lesson! Maybe you could make another video where you improvise with arpeggios, but list the changes on the screen for us slower folks who are trying to follow along at home😂

A couple of things opened up finger style for me. Peirre Besusan has this excessive in his guitar book that has you playing all the notes in the D major scale with your thumb as you ascend and defend the high string with your other fingers. It’s simple but I could make it sound musical until I took a leap of faith to imagine the bass note and play them. Sort of not worry about the high strings. Just trust that would be taken care of. It started to sound much better with this approach.

Another one was playing octaves over two pentatonic or major that as stacked on top of each other. Play the root this way then the 2nd and so forth. Something clicked in how you can connect these scale patterns together. You can evolve that think to use 3rd and 5th etc. actually interesting what you said about the arpeggios going up and down neck. Might be able to do the same with this.

Really good advice. Thanks man! Could you talk a bit about how you started dipping your toes into playing solo gigs: utilizing the looper, did you have like a template for building the groove and chords? What kind of tunes did you start out with, did you arrange the tunes in a particular way for an easy transition into solo playing? Any other insights on getting started with low key solo gigs at the local wine bar?

Great topic as always and love the sound of that tele!  Btw what gauge strings do you use on that tele?

what you are describing sounds somewhat similar to diagonal pentatonic scales….minor or major.

theres so many lesson ive never learned and probably never will because im isolated and cant play with other ppl

If you're the best musician in the band, you need a better band.