guitarists-from-brazil

"How to improve melody... I get this question a lot. I think people kind of make something too complicated out of that. There's a lot of rules. You can [read] books about the melodies... But [if] you have great songs all around; if you have a nice chord progression, you can just follow [it] and play the notes of the chords, and it's gonna work. Then, sometimes, you deviate and come back, but you don't need to think much about it. [...] You can also just pay attention to melodies... and play melodies. Get the guitar, and play melodies. I think guitar players, in general, at least from my generation, learn scales, the pentatonics, the shapes of the modes, the triads, this and that, and we don't play a lot of melodies. So that's something that I was paying more attention to later [in my career]... I just try to play the melody. No fancy arpeggios, no nothing. Just a singable melody."

"Start looking around, and then just learn how to play the melodies from songs you like. It can be traditional songs from your country, pop songs, modern, whatever — melodies from songs you like. Classical music, right? You can play exactly the same melody in so many different ways. That's what creates this emotion, mainly when you play instrumental music. But [also] in any music, of course, because the singer will do the same. In classical music, this is mandatory to develop that sense of how to interpret the melody. Because you're playing songs [where] you cannot change any note, but the only thing you can change is how you interpret those notes, right? So we can learn a lot from classical players."