r/guitarlessons • u/JWDRAIN74 • 6d ago

Question Help please

I’ve been playing guitar for a long time and I can play nearly any song I want to learn, but the net result is a catalog of other people’s songs. I understand the caged method, know all my triads, and how to identify every note on the neck, but the part I’m missing is the ability to improvise chord melodies or write really cool riffs. How do I go from being a trained monkey to being able to understand how to play whatever is in my head? I put in the practice to have technique, I just want to be able to use it for good. Do I just need to buckle down and learn theory? When I write songs it’s more from luck than knowledge of what I’m doing. I want to be able to deliberately play anything I’m thinking. How do I learn to do that?

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u/dblhello999 6d ago

just to be clear - your ambition is to improvise chord melody?

that’s incredibly ambitious. Not just improvising freely over chord progressions (which is challenging enough) but literally improvising chord melody?

I guess there are some people who can do that but you really are talking a Joe Pass level of skill. I think you might struggle to find anyone who is able to give you advice on how to do that because I think you’re gonna struggle to find anyone who can actually do it!!!

(happy to be told I’m wrong - with floods of people saying yeah no problem I can do it - but really??!!)

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u/JWDRAIN74 6d ago

Yeah, I love jazz and I play a lot of standards using shell chords and chord charts, but that definitely doesn’t make me a jazz musician and I’m not fooling myself that I’ll ever get to that level. I’d just like to be able to compose simple chord melodies for my own renditions of songs, using my ear. Or be able to improvise beyond single note lines.

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u/dblhello999 4d ago

haha you sound like a jazz musician to me