Dan Miller - The Guitar Player's Guide to Developing Creative Solos

Dan Miller The Guitar Player's Guide to Developing Creative Solos PDF. In this new 260-page book Dan Miller presents three different approaches to learning how to develop creative, interesting, and tasteful melody-based solos on the acoustic guitar. After outlining the process of finding key, chords, and melody on the guitar by ear, the first approach to developing a solo uses a variety of guitar techniques to embellish and add to the melody. Each technique is taught using many song examples. The techniques­ start with the Carter style chord-melody technique and then add hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, double stops, various chord strum patterns, bass runs, crosspicking, drone strings, tremolo, neighboring notes, and short scale runs.
The second approach that is presented is one based on theory and scales. Five different scale “colors” are addressed: the major pentatonic scale, the major scale, the major blues scale, the minor pentatonic scale, and the minor blues scale. For each scale a number of scale pattern exercises and song examples are given. Additionally, tips are provided regarding the use of melodic and vocal phrasing, limiting exercises, dynamics, and note articulation in creating a solo that fits the mood, groove, feel, and meaning of the song. Each scale is first presented by itself, through exercises and examples, so that the reader can get a feel for its unique “color.” Then these scales are combined to show how several scale colors can be used in the same solo. Next, the author shows how to combine the scale, or “theoretical approach,” with the technique approach of the first section of the book.
The final approach to developing a solo is the “intuitive approach.” In this section the author gives you a series of exercises that are designed to get you out of your analytical left brain and get into your intuitive, creative, and insightful right brain. This section will help you develop more feeling and emotion in your playing as you learn how to play from your “gut” instead of your analytical brain or memory.
Over 60 individual songs are presented as examples in this book. For each song, the song melody is given, and then an example arrangement is shown. For many songs, more than one arrangement is presented. The old folk song “John Henry” is used as the main example in each section of the book and for that song a total of 25 different arrangements are shown. Over 150 song arrangements are included in this book.
This book is not a book of song arrangements that are meant for you to learn, memorize, and perform by rote. This book is designed to teach you how to take any song melody and create your own arrangements based on that melody. Ultimately, the techniques, methods, and ideas that are presented in this book will not only enable you to create an endless number of interesting and tasteful melody-based arrangements and variations for any songs that you want to learn, they will also lead you to a high level of comfort with improvisation of any song melody.

Format: PDF + CD Audio tracks (Mp3). 269 pages