A few days ago I got a call from my friend to drop by his house and add a guitar track onto a song he had been working on. I'm always up for doing some recording, so I agreed and thought it would be fun.

One thing that has remains true for me is that I always learn something new whenever I do recording projects.

For this song they asked me to provide lead fills behind the singer and then move into a full solo at the end of the song. I took several passes at the song with 3 other people sitting right next to me in the recording room, watching my every move. Pretty soon I was getting suggestions from all sides of the room from each person on what they wanted to hear in the solo. This becomes a tough job to please everyone, but sooner or later they were happy with my tracks ... however I walked away with some things that I wanted to work on.

After reviewing all of the comments that were coming at me during that afternoon session, the one thing that kept coming back was the people wanted me to play less and make more concise musical statements. In other words, they wanted me to be more lyrical in my solo and not ramble on. I didn't even realize that I was doing that, but when you're under the microscope of a recording session, everything gets noticed, (yikes)!

So after that, I decided that I needed to come up with a way to practice playing more lyrically and make this part of my practicing. So, I came up with a sort of game to help me concentrate on this approach, to keep reminding myself to make musical statements in my solos. If you're like me, you spend more time practicing your favorite licks, and scales, etc, but not very much time practicing playing less, making your notes count as ideas!

Here are the things that I've been doing to help practice in this approach:
- grab your favorite backing tracks. Blues tracks work well because of the structure of the changes, making it easier to repeat ideas, etc.
- start out your solo by playing some kind of short musical idea, keeping it kind of simple (say 1-2 bars long if possible)
- pause after your first musical statement
- now, repeat that same musical idea over the next chord change by either playing the exact same idea or changing a few notes to fit the chord that you're playing over (assuming that the chords have changed from when you made your first statement). You can even try playing your same idea up or down an octave. Think of this as an answer to your first statement.
- Now, repeat your first musical statement again, and change one thing, such as the last note.
- Next, introduce a new musical statement and keep trying to thread the ideas together in this way where you introduce an idea, then you answer it by trying to repeat it in some way on the next change, etc.

This excercise forces you to listen to yourself. It also forces you to think more like a conversation (stream of musical statements) rather than just spewing a long stream of notes.

What I'm finding is that it helps you to focus your solo more and it even helps to break you out of the same tired licks.

Hope this is helpful to anyone trying to come up with a way to practice phrasing.

-- Jim