Improve Your Solos with Drones and Pedal Notes

What if you were asked to were asked to play a guitar solo act where you had to play for 10 solid minuteswhile your band goes below for some R & R. Would you be able to keep your audience's interest that long? Would you be able to lead your audience through an experience that they will remember positively? Would your band rejoin you just when the audience is roaring their approval? Or would you flame out and self-destruct becauseyour solos really go nowhere interesting, and you are staring into a sea of yawns?

The difference is in the melody, your understanding of good melody, and how it influences your audience. Good melody is a sense you should over-develop. This will set your original playing apart from thecrowd of lead players, even if your speed and flashy playing only comes in bursts.

How Droning Can Help

Droning is a single note or chord sustained for a very long time. Think of the sound of your car engine droning through the desert highways of Arizona. The next time you are in your car driving down the freeway, try humming in unison with your car engine and wheels. Once you find you are in perfect unison, try humming an original melody that works over the sound of your car. Through trial and error, you will eventually learn what works and what doesn't. You might find that you are more melodic singing than playing guitar. This is because you can focus on the melody without letting technical aspects of an instrument get in the way.

Establishing a drone and playing melody on top is an excellent exercise for guitar as well. I you have an A/B switch with delay effect, play a single note or chord on infinite delay through your A channel, then switch to your B channel to start plucking out melodies, licks, lines and voicings top of the drone you have created.

If you don't have all this equipment, just play with in the key of E or A, using the open string as a drone. Using the remaining strings, work out melodies, licks, lines and voicings that are powerful and compelling.Only re-attack the open string as required to help sustain the droning note so you can play melody over the top.

Pedal Notes

Pedal notes play a role similar to drones, except that the notes are attacked at a constant repeating rate. Pedal notes can be played alternately with notes in the melody, as in Flamenco classics Malaguena and Leyenda de Asturias.

How It Works

You've seen this picture before, but practicing over droning can help you internalize the theory here and make it work from a gut level. The drone note is the tonic, or I note in the scale that you happen to be playing in. By playing notes relative to the tonic, you begin to recognize how notes other than the tonic create a sense of tension or resolve to the tonic or a neighboring note. Don't memorize this picture. Instead, learn to feel the tension and resolve of the notes, and evaluate that pull and direction from an emotionallevel:

Droning and pedal note techniques are not only fun to play, they forces your to play a melody that works with or against the tonic. These exercises will accentuate what works and what doesn't. See, when itsounds good, it sounds really good, and when its bad, it sounds really bad. These exercises will accelerate the rate at which your ear improves.

Some of the best guitar solo acts use a simple but powerful tool to create their own accompaniment while they solo away. Steve Morse, Eric Johnson and Jeff Beck use droning on a loop to accompany their solos very effectively in live shows.