Do you want to know a secret to good improvisation on guitar and music in general? 🤔

Repetition. As Adam Neely says, “Repetition legitimizes… repetition legitimizes… repetition legitimizes”

There’s a cognitive reason for that: our brain LOVES patterns. What makes music so amazing is the way that the musical elements create this constant push/pull between expectations being fulfilled and not fulfilled. So our brain releases TONS of neurochemicals when we detect, predict, and fulfill the expectations that musical patterns makes, and also when those expectations are not fulfilled! 🧠

In this riff, we’re using the melodic ostinato to create the pattern, and then the very last bar creates an “expectation violation” that makes level 3 hit harder than if I had just continued the fingerpicking pattern into level 3. 🤓

Happy riffing! 🎸