An approach to learning improvisation

As you may already know, Stephane Wrembel has numerous free play-along tracks at his website (http://www.stephanewrembel.com/). Besides being a wicked guitarist, he is the author of the very useful book "Getting into Gypsy Jazz Guitar", which is published by Mel Bay. One day I was slightly bored, so I decided to make a list of all the tracks his site offers and then check Wikipedia's site of Django tunes (http://www.djangopedia.com/) to see if it has the chord changes for all of Wrembel's tracks. I then hit upon the idea of organizing these songs by key just to see which keys Django favored. Not surprisingly, an overwhelming majority of the keys were guitar friendly ones such as G, C, D, and so on. After studying this list for a little while, I had the realization that when you learn one song, you're really learning several (or, at the very least, large sections of several). For example, if you look at the changes for "Confessin'" and "Dinah" (both in G major), you'll see that the chords for both are pretty similar, the only major difference being the little E minor section in "Dinah." This idea of "learning one song means you are really learning several" makes improvisation more manageable and much less daunting. Once I realized this, Wrembel's book really started making sense to me. He lists five neck positions for the various types of arpeggios (minor/major/dominant, along with their color tones), as well as diminished runs and harmonic minor scale positions. If you start learning how to improvise on tunes that do not have many chord changes ("Minor Swing", "Blues", "Douce Ambience", etc), you'll quickly see that you only have to get three to five arpeggio types/positions (one for each chord in the tune) under your fingers in order to begin improvising. You can simplify this approach even further by not trying to get all five positions for each type of arpeggio under your fingers before you attempt to improvise. You can simply learn one or two for each chord in a tune and start with that. Of course, you will be limited in your note choices, but you have to start somewhere, and this is much more manageable than waiting until you have all five positions down for each chord in a song.

Summary: Being able to improvise means knowing all the "zones" on the guitar's neck and how they correspond with the various chord types. For example, if you think "G dominant seventh chord", you should ideally be able to play this shape in five different positions on the neck without hesitation. It's all about visual recognition and muscle memory.