Approaches to fusion guitar - looking for resources

Harmony & Theory
#1

Hi everyone,

I want to expand my improvisation vocabulary so I thought going for fusion guitar might be a good idea. I feel stuck in a rut of taking scale fragments or arpeggios and repeating them over and over. I will admit that I feel intimitated by solos from Guthrie Govan etc. since I can´t really figure out their approaches to licks by just listening. I´d also like to know if there are actually systematic approaches to learning fusion guitar, just like there are approaches to learning Bebop soloing (connecting the notes of a chord with enclosures/ passing tones etc.) Martin Miller has a new book out that goes into concepts regarding solos. I think I´ll give it a try.

I am looking forward to your recommendations.

Have a great weekend,

Dairwolf

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#2

Hey! I’ve actually been meaning to get my hands on some Jack Gardiner courses. He has a bundle on fundamentals on fretboard vizualitation and applied music theory for guitar, aswell as some more advanced improv courses, reharmonization and other things so that you can keep advancing in your journey. Also Tom Quayle I believe has a fusion bundle on his site that includes a pretty extensive library of tutorials on different topics applied to fusion styles.

And then I think everybody feels intimitated by Guthrie Govan so you are not alone there. Can’t really feel bad about that.

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#3

Thank you very much for the recommendations. I will definetely check them out.

I searched a little bit on Youtube and rediscovered David Walliman. He has some great introductory stuff. If I understand it correctly, when those fusion guitarists play faster stuff, they 1) play more or less memorized patterns they go to and 2) those patterns can consist of basically every (??) note, whether outside or inside, as long as you end one of those phrases on a note that is in key. I might be mistaken here though…

This one here was a big eye opener for me:

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#4

this is really nice, it actually makes a lot of sense, I guess it’s similar to your more traditional shred rock and metal guitar, you are likely to go to memorized patterns for the fast parts as opposed to trying to come up with something on the spot that could result in unclean playing.

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