I’ve been working on this myself a lot lately and is likely a life long pursuit. The most helpful thing I’ve come across so far is Tom Quayle’s lesson, “visualizing the fretboard” or something like that.
Basically start by just concentrating on the chord tones for each chord over a given progression. Then add in either scale tones or chromatic tones. Use a short rhythmic motif also when playing. I highly recommend anyone to watch it.
I second this! Tom’s a great teacher and the lesson in question describes an intervallic approach to visualise the fretboard rather than a patter-centric one. 
It’s the same thing as “guitar faces.” You need to create an actual connection to the guitars layout and your inner voice.
Many of us can create “freestyle” solos or songs in our head, but to actually put that out in physical form requires real dedication to the guitar. You need to turn the guitar fret board into a form of language. So when you feel like, AAAAAAAAGGGGHHHH you can actually express that on the instrument. And it will naturally come across. I believe the best way to achieve this is a full understanding of the notes and an understanding that almost everything you play for the most part is 7 notes dispersed through octaves across the fret board. Really spending time in those 7 note sections and carrying melody’s up and down through the octaves will build a intuitive communication ability that will speak to someone who has zero knowledge of music.
When I first started learning to improvise, I felt like I was mostly playing patterns or stringing disconnected licks together.
There were a few lesson videos that I found very helpful when I was first starting to learn to improvise.
Firstly, Carl Verheyen’s Intervallic Rock. The focus of this video is Carl’s approach to creating melodic lines, and how he feels we develop a distinctive style.
In Carl’s terminology, a “line” is a musical statement which makes sense. Carl talks about making lines more interesting by exploring different intervals, which helps to move away from scalar sounding playing, which is based heavily on minor and major seconds for diatonic scales and major seconds and minor thirds for pentatonics.
He talks about creating lines that move through different areas of the fretboard as a means of breaking out of pattern or box based playing. He also discusses how a line of any type, be it major, minor or dominant, can be modified to create variations of the other types.
After creating a line and its variations, Carl says to write it down. Some variations you might not like so much, and others you might not be able to really get under your fingers. What your left with will become part of your personal style.
This video had a big effect on me. The concepts and framework Carl outlines helped me to develop a vocabulary of my own melodic lines. Since I was already starting with a solid technique, I was able to get a lot of the lines I created under my fingers pretty quickly. My playing definitely became more interesting and more personal from that point. Also, Carl’s approach definitely helped me to learnt to identify different intervals by ear and visualize them on the fretboard.
While I had a lot more to say, I felt like I now had something of a different problem. While improvising, I felt like I was speaking from a phrasebook, because essentially, I was. It was a big phrasebook, consisting of phrases which were mostly my own, but it was still limited.
The analogy I’d give is that it was a little like a character’s dialog in a video game. When they’re reciting their lines in a scripted sequence it can be interesting, even compelling. Outside of that context, you soon recognize that they’re drawing from a phrasebook. They might be able to answer a simple question or two with a prepared answer, or share a few interesting statements, but they can’t have a conversation with you that feels real, or put their phrases together in a way that tells a sensible story.
I couldn’t adapt my lines to fit different contexts. If a chord change came up that I had to address, you could usually hear where I was trying to join two prepared lines together, which often didn’t really make sense together. Sometimes I would try to prepare lines for that situation, but there would always be another situation. looking back, part of the problem was that the lines I was creating were just too long and too specific.
Also, since I didn’t really know yet what was and what was not really amenable to be played at very fast speeds, this didn’t really help me to create a vocabulary of ideas that could be played very fast. That came later.
This wasn’t the fault of Carl’s video at all, it’s just where I was at at that point. Honestly, what I managed to get from an hour long video was huge.
Next, and probably most important for me was Scott Henderson’s Jazz-Rock Mastery, which is bundle which contains his instructional videos Jazz Fusion Improvisation and Melodic Phrasing.
Jazz Fusion Improvisation is mostly focused on what scales and arpeggios you can play over certain chord types. It’s good information, and it definitely helped to inform note choices and and add colour to the lines I was creating with Carl’s methods. However, it’s based in the Chord-Scale Theory idea and I had difficultly implementing it in real-time improvisation over changes.
In Melodic Phrasing, Scott teaches you what to do with the notes you choose. It is bar none the most important instructional video to my musical development that I have ever watched.
After half an hour I was out of my depth harmonically, but even just watching that and taking in the concepts and examples that Scott gives was huge for me. It was a complete conceptual shift for me. Just the change in mindset it gave me immediately made me a noticeably better improviser.
Taking the concepts to heart really helped me understand what I need to do to progress and develop as an improviser. I still have a lot of work to do harmonically. The example he gives of the Tribal Tech song “Peru” is way too complex for me to play over yet.
Jimmy Bruno’s No Nonsense Jazz Guitar helped me get started with more conventional Jazz. I wrote about my experience with it here.
Last one I’d mention is Eric Johnson’s Total Electric Guitar. When I first got it, I used it mostly as a resource for studying Eric’s specific style and playing mechanics. However, there’s an important theme throughout the video of imitating your influences and assimilating what you earn into you own playing to develop your style.
I really started to focus on this idea later, listening to my favourite players and trying to emulate the minutia of their playing. It’s something of a cliché answer, but it really is important if you want to start hearing your influences in your own playing.
@Tom_Gilroy very nice post. I wanted to chime in with some related concepts that have helped me over the years.
I should start with the disclaimer that I don’t consider myself a good improviser, BUT that is because I have not practiced improvising much. The concepts that make for a good improvised solo, I am very solid on…I just cannot call them up in real time at the drop of a hat, because again, I haven’t prioritized that in my own playing 
That may be enough for some to just skip over the rest of what I have to say and that is fine lol But please stick around!
To start, I’d like to talk about a ‘line’. The term is thrown around a lot. At its most basic, it is a melody. Typically it progresses by scale step. I start with that because I think when people talk too much about scales and chords/arpeggios or substitutes, while those things work they can also lead us away from the line and I think that is unmusical. I love this video, because it shows how something as complex as Giant Steps can have a melodic line within the solo. Simply playing the changes and hitting notes that ‘work’ don’t necessarily satisfy this, as the artist points out:
A line is so important not only in Jazz but even in classical music. The (arguably) most influential music theorist of modern times, Heinrich Schenker, built his belief system around this. He sort of had his own ‘Cracking the Code’ for composition. College courses at the graduate level cover this in depth, but at the high level, he postulated that master pieces of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin (insert any other master classical composer) etc had a smooth melodic line that prevailed throughout each piece. It was cloaked by many ‘less important’ notes that connected these dots. Essentially, each masterpiece could be boiled down to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, with many notes in between Again, that doesn’t do Schenker’s work justice and is very much a summary. It is of course a ‘theory’, but there’s some point in music where theory becomes largely fact and I think his findings are so widely accepted in classical circles that almost no one in academia is dismissive of the notion.
At a lecture in college our theory professor told a story about a music theory convention he attended where someone wrote a paper connecting the theories of Schenker to the jazz improvisations of the great Bill Evans. Apparently people where skeptical, but the presentation ended with audio of an interview with Evans himself that indicated this was indeed the way he ‘thought’ when he improvised and there were gasps from the audience. With no citation I am indeed spreading hearsay, but I have faith in my professor lol. Plus, even in the rare case he was misrepresenting, that is a cool legend to help spread
With that as a backdrop, I think improvising over changes and creating phrases becomes less complicated if thinking of a simple melodic line first. I think many aspiring improvisers, especially those coming from a more rock background, can get lost in the scales/modes/arpgeggios/subs etc Obviously knowing when the chords change and what notes are available for more color will aid you, but that is step 2. If we start with a melody that contains a smooth line (even the main tune of the song itself!!!), we are headed in the right direction
I’ve been working on Giant Steps a lot lately myself, and came up with a study that uses all DSX to play over the changes.
It was a fun exercise because I made certain that I preserved the original melody within the lines. I guess it’s more like a classical theme and variation since it’s written out, but I think it’s a nice way to demonstrate how to think about changes. As quickly as the chords change and the frequency of modulations makes it a challenging tune to ‘really improvise’ over, but given this outline it’s not so bad. And my thinking is the concept could easily transfer to other jazz pieces where the changes aren’t so rapid.
I’m planning on doing a video to accompany this and sync it in the near future. I’ll probably make a thread dedicated to it at that point in the show and tell section, and I intend to have more repetitions (maybe one with all USX) , but in case anyone is interested before that happens, have at it! Happy soloing!
Thanks @joebegly, very nice post also.
I actually haven’t spent any time practicing Giant Steps. Looking at the progression, I don’t think I’d even try to address all the chords as they appear.
Instead, I’d just try to address the movement of the tonics:
B -> G -> Eb -> G -> Eb -> B -> Eb -> G -> B -> Eb
Still a challenging sequence to be sure, but the movements are now all in major 3rds. I’d still have to learn the sequence and the harmonic rhythm (which isn’t constant).
Since the intermediate chords are always the V or the ii-V of the next chord and have dominant function to that next chord, you now have a little bit of a cushion between the changes. Basically anything will work over the V or ii-V provided you address the tonic by targeting a chord tone. You might get tension on the V or ii-V, but that’s kind of the whole point of V or ii-V. I wouldn’t really be worried about it. Actually, as somebody who listens to Holdsworth and Bartók, I’d probably enjoy the dissonances.
Then, I’d practice praying over the progression in small areas of the neck, not much more than an octave at a time. Basically, this would be to get myself comfortable switching between the 3 basic pitch sets for B, G and Eb all over the neck, and get some ideas for short motifs that I could play through the changes.
That would be my approach. The basic tonic movement in thirds is something I’m already fairly comfortable with, but I’d still struggle with the specific sequence of tonic movement, the harmonic rhythm and the sheer speed of the piece.