Learning Guitar Soloing + So Much More!

Hi all - I just wanted to share a bunch of stuff I've learned so far in my musical journey of just over a year now. I thought this project of creating a backing track for me to learn guitar soloing would be a great example to showcase what I've learned.

First off, thanks to my teacher, Mark. I've learned so much in a relatively short time. I won't make this an instructional post on guitar soloing, as Mark is way better at that than I am but instead show how I learned to make a backing track and a video and talk a little about the assignment.

Recently we've started working on soloing. My assignment was to solo using the A minor pentatonic scale over a 12 bar blues backing track. His assignment looks something like this:

There are tons of YouTube backing tracks for playing along to but I couldn't find one that fit the assignment so I decided to create one myself. I used my iPad and Garage Band to create a 12 bar piece by picking a drummer and configuring the rhythms etc., playing the canned chords and arpeggios for bass, piano, and acoustic guitar using the above chord progression. (I know it doesn't sound too bluesy but bear in mind I needed something quick so I used the canned stuff but I will definitely be exploring how to do this myself in the future.)

From there I played my creation out of Garage Band on my iPad into my Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface and captured the stream in Ableton Live 10 Lite. After a little editing, I exported the audio to an MP3. 

Finally, I grabbed my free copy of Movie Maker 10 and mixed and edited some screen shots from the above tools and created a video to upload to YouTube. Now I have a 3:00 minute backing track I can practice to!

One of the apps you see screen grabbed in the video is called Guitar Scales & Chords Power. Below is a piece of one of the screen grabs that should help you see the target notes you want to land as you learn to improvise:

The lesson is to play short phrases (2-4 notes) for each bar and end the phrase on the target note (or chord root). Can you see the A, the D, and the E on the first three strings?

Here's the video: https://youtu.be/KSH_SHkaEJQ

Let me know what you are learning. I'll probably post more as I learn more Garage Band, Ableton Live Lite 10, or anything else I find interesting. Thanks!