I've been taking a close look at my own playing lately, always looking for areas to improve. One area that I'm really focusing on right now is phrasing, and coming up with ways to improve it.

To emphasize the importance of phrasing, Scott Henderson uses a funny quote in his instructional DVD to make his point he says: "I'd rather hear Albert King drop his guitar on the floor once, than to hear an endless solo of continuous eighth notes from a Jazz player"

For me, the best exercise for phrasing is to practice soloing over blues progressions. Focus on making some kind of opening statement over the 1 chord. Next, try to find a way to answer it or repeat it on the IV chord and so on. If one idea starts to take hold and you feel the need to repeat it again, all the better. The key thing is that you're trying to focus on making yourself react to what you have just played, almost as if you're having a conversation in some way. Listen to yourself and react to your own lines as you play. If you're playing a continuous string of notes, then you're just rambling, and your audience will eventually tune out.

The other thing you can do to practice phrasing (or making yourself focus on it), is to limit your note choices to only a few notes for your whole solo. Practice taking those 3 or 4 notes and making little rhythmic statements with them. You would be suprised at what you can come up with when you force yourself to be more creative with limited note choices and focus on the phrasing.

When you work on things like this, you start to have a more interesting aspect to your solos. Your solos will tend to build better and become more musical overall.

If any of you have other ideas for working on phrasing please pass them along.

-- Jim