This material will help you consolidate and expand the vocabulary that’s available to you for creating great-sounding guitar parts, and help you recall and access what’s available to you when you’re on the spot. It’s going to be useful therefore for any type of jam situation, and also for giving you ways of developing accompaniments to songs you might compose or covers you might want to arrange. We’ll use ideas from the arranging elements to create ways of staying on one chord and exploring all the musicality it offers, from the perspective of the rhythm, of note choice and texture. You can develop some really great-sounding parts that you can use ad hoc when you’re playing an open chord progression you’ve just been given, or that you can build into the arrangements you create for your own compositions.
Play these four bar sequences for G and A. There are four boxes that describe how each bar is being arranged. Make sure that you can relate what is in each box to what is in each bar. Then play through the arrangement.
Creative application/integration:
1 – Play the examples above, and once you have played as written, vary the pull- offs/hammer-ons – find another place relative to the chord where you can add hammer-ons and pull-offs.
2 – Now swap the chords around so that you use a different chord from the key of G/C for the first sequence (using a different chord from those keys will allow you to keep similar hammer-on / pull-off notes).
3 – Use a different chord out of E/D/B for the second sequence (using one of these will allow you to keep the same notes).
4 – Then swap the sequences around, so play an A chord over the first and a G for the second (which will mean you have to adjust the notes you can use for the hammer-ons/pull-offs). When you play G for the second, either keep the last bar as it is (this will imply a change to the A chord) or play some kind of G fill.
5 – Now try swapping chords half way through the sequence, and then alternate chords every bar. You can alternate between two chords, or you can have a three/four chord sequence. See if you think that switching chords more alters how much variation your ear wants to hear in the guitar part or not.
6 – Swap between four bars where you have created this detailed accompaniment, and four bars where you use a strumming pattern from one of the essential grooves – and work on swapping from one to the other without skipping a beat. Use the same four chords in each.
7 – Now see if you can reverse the order of the arrangement for each example. So for G, start with chordal picking, then do offbeat hammer on plus 2 slides, then do rhythm word 6 plus off beat hammer-on, then play low notes plus hammer on.
8 – Create one more way of playing the same chord for four bars that uses at least one of the bars from the written example. You can stay on the G / A chords or choose a different chord. You can use all the same elements but reshuffle, or you can just keep one bar or half a bar.
9 – Complete freestyle – choose any chords you like – max four – and create 8 bars of arrangement. Have as much or little variation as you like. You might have a two bar pattern that repeats. You might do four bars with arranging elements and four strummed.
Submit your reference recordings with a name that describes which creative application they relate to.
