A way to practice playing over changes

I work really hard on practicing guitar and little etudes and stuff, and here's a way to practice playing guitar to the changes of a song (i.e. when you're playing over a G7, you are playing to that chord and not just running your standard G mixolydian or pentatonic or blues scale). This is absolutely critical for jazz guitar study, but even in your standard rock or blues practice, playing to the moment you're in, as opposed to just playing notes that you know won't sound off, will make all your work tastier and more melodic.

Regardless, here's the exercise:

Set a metronome to a nice slow beat, 80 is fine, 60 might be better, but don't rush because I'm gonna make you hurt a little.

Pick a set of chord changes. When in doubt, grab say a 1 - 4 - 5 progression. In the key of C, this'll be a C - F - G.

Now, we're going to go through each string one by one, and we are going to play the scale tones associated with that chord. For simplicity, we're going to stay in the key of C but as you get more comfortable with the exercise, I strongly encourage you to get weird with it.

So, starting on the low E, we're going to play the 1 of each chord, WITH the metronome, changing each bar.

C - 8th fret F- 1st fret G - 3rd fret.

Then play the 2 of each chord (staying within the C major scale for the moment)

D - 10th fret G- 3rd fret A 5th fret

Now the 3

E - 12th (or 0th) fret A- 5th fret B- 7th fret

Now the 4

F - 1st B 7th (hey, wait a minute that's a #4 not a perfect 4!) C - 8th fret

And so on through the scale, 5th 6th 7th (remember the C and F will have a maj7 and the G will not, since we're staying in C major). Changing every bar, and once you've gone all the way through the 7, change strings.

I realize this exercise is somewhere between really stupid and really difficult, depending on your level of experience, but what it does is open up the fretboard, so you're not just playing shapes, you're playing to the harmony and most critically, playing to a moment in time within the song, which is constantly shifting and changing around you. It forces you to skate ahead of the puck a little bit, and think about where the harmony was, where it is, and where it's going as you jam over the song.

Once you get good at this, obviously, the easiest thing to do is to change chords faster, and to add more interesting harmonic progressions. Grab a song out of the real book if you really want to blow your hair back and then crank the metronome up.

For your beginner to intermediate player wanting a little more spice in this exercise, try making them all dominant 7s -- C7- F7 - G7.