Building a Rhythmic Foundation for Improvisation

Here's a lesson on how to get better at improvising. I'll share one tip that's been super helpful for me over the years.

A common mistake guitar players make: as guitarists, we tend to overemphasize the importance of harmony, often at the expense of rhythm.

If you develop a nice rhythmic pattern vocabulary and build up simple rhythmic patterns in a logical way, you're going to sound sophisticated even if there's not a lot of harmonic content in your lines.

By focusing on rhythm and emphasizing rhythmic patterns, you can make big leaps in your improvising.

Here's a two chord progression in D. I'll play a basic rhythmic phrase. I took a basic rhythmic phrase, started to repeat it, built it up like a motif, and then started to build lines off of it that had rhythmic integrity versus just a harmonic idea or a chord or scale idea.