Improvising memorable country guitar solos requires three key skills: Knowing the melody of the song and how to play it anywhere on the fretboard; Visualizing the scales and patterns that you're planning to use, and most importantly; Shifting your mindset from "focused-woodshed-mode" to a more spontaneous and creative stage mode.

The first two skills are relatively easy to acquire. It’s the third skill that Johnny Hiland focuses on and demonstrates very clearly in this Shed to Stage edition of Ten Gallon Guitar.

”Most guitar players spend thousands of hours practicing and cramming tons of knowledge, chords, theory, techniques and all the other stuff we need to learn and understand to become better players.

But when we’re on the gig or even just jamming with friends, it's so hard to free our mind of all that knowledge and just play from the heart and have fun on the stage. You're supposed to have fun playing guitar when you're on the stage. And trust me folks, your audience knows it as well.

I created this course to pass on a really easy approach for shifting your mindset from the shed to the stage. Melody is the key! This approach is especially effective for country guitarists because we all improvise our solos based around the melody of the song that we’re playing."

Johnny organized the course into three sections. In the first section, Johnny shares a primer on melody and why it's so important for soloing. He’ll share some of his own key learnings and explain how his "Shed to Stage” system works. In the second section, you’ll dig deeper with Johnny as he shares his own "woodshed findings” and shows you the practice routines he uses to prepare for his own performances.

You learn a variety of options for embellishing the melody, crafting a solo from the melody, connecting and moving major scales around the fretboard, using pentatonic, blues scales and chromatic runs and licks to build your solo around the melody.

In the third and final section, you’ll put the Shed to Stage system to work across a series of soloing studies using real band tracks from some of Johnny’s tunes.

”We’ll start by learning the melody and exploring a few options we have for licks and embellishments, and we’ll play a solo using this approach, over the band track. I’ll point out lots of other related Shed to Stage tips for country soloing along the way.

We’ll solo and improvise over lots of different keys and country feels like western swing, rockabilly, train-beats, rockin’ country blues, sweet country shuffles and honky tonk throw-downs.”

Johnny will explain and demonstrate all of the key Shed to Stage concepts and approaches along the way. You’ll get standard notation and tabs for all of the performance studies. Plus, you’ll be able to use TrueFire’s learning tools to sync the tab and notation to the video lesson.

You can also loop or slow down the videos so that you can work with the lessons at your own pace. All of the backing tracks are also included to work with on your own.

Grab your guitar, and let’s go from the "Shed to the Stage” with Johnny Hiland!

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