Hi - John here, from Florida

[jmeg8237]

Hi, I'm John, and I live in Naples, Florida (southwest coast, near the Everglades). I'm on the older side (63). I started guitar around age 10 or so, after I'd had a few years of piano lessons but wanted to learn guitar. (I still sit down at the piano occasionally, but most of my focus has been on guitar.) Had a couple of years of guitar lessons in my teens, and played quite a bit during my teens, but by the time I'd started college, I kind of put the guitar away, only picking one up very occasionally. I was always comfortable with chords but never "graduated to the next level" of soloing and improvising, etc. I've been getting back into it in recent years and feel like I'm finally making some progress in those areas. It helps that I'm recently retired so I have more time available to practice. Have been playing in a band with some neighbors for a couple of years now, and now I'm really our only guitarist, so I'm finally taking on some lead solos, but they're more or less canned solos, with very little improvisation. I play around with blues backing tracks some of the time and that's helped. I know the pentatonic patterns reasonably well now, but feel like I need to flesh them out with the remaining notes that make up the full scales. My biggest challenges at this point, other than just knowledge of full scale patterns up and down the neck, are smoothness, speed, and bending accuracy. I have a pretty good handle on the music theory behind the modes and how they are used, but haven't yet devoted time to learning the patterns.