Help to break away from pure pentatonics

frankus

heh my biggest sin is forgetting I'm not practising and thinking "does a b9 go here... how about here? ... or here?" at some stage on the rare occassions I play live I see an audience member grimace and think - ah yeah back to it.

Sambostar

What worked for me at first is learning pentatonics in all positions up the neck.  I mean so you can play them blind.  Just through doing that you'll introduce different tones and freaky things from the position you're in.  Then I figured I should do the same for scales, up and down the strings and in any position, that opened it up a bit. It also made learning the seven modes easy too. 

Also using octaves and playing in octaves helped, repeating or modifying stuff over three or four octaves and this can be runs of notes that sound good to you, kind of like making up your own scales and patterns I guess.  Better than staying in a single postion anyway.

After that, it really comes down to your ear, how you want things to sound, or how you interpret them and chords really help identify the notes.

Often, just sitting down and slowly seeing what notes sound good is not a bad way to go, rather tha shredding or belting out the blues.  Then you can repeat over the octaves and learning them up the neck shouldn't take a few minutes as you know the scales for reference, you can use wide intervals and semi tone bends for a freakier sound.

I like the semi tone bends too Demartini-esque notes pinched from Lynch and wide single string intervals really identify his 80's style for example and with a few choice notes you can instantly sound like him.