distant_haze,
Everything scotty_b has said here is right on the money. Let me add a couple things for you to consider.
I get the idea from your post that you may not completely grasp what improvisation is. Let me begin by defining what it is not. It isn't a God given ability to invent melodies from nowhere. It isn't a bolt of lightning that enables one to become a monster soloist. It isn't a mystical gift which only a few have because they are special.
Improvisation is the spontaeous reorganization of your musical vocabulary. In other words, the rearrangement of something that already exists. It is learned the same way a spoken language is learned because music and improvisation are languages.
When you speak or carry on a conversation, you don't instantly invent the words you speak. They already exist. Likewise, when we solo we use patterns and ideas which already exist in the language of music.
When we speak, we generally do so intuitively and it seems to be an automatic process. However, if you consider how babies learn to speak, it is neither intuitve nor automatic. Language is learned by imitation. We repeat the words and phrases we hear our parents speak. Upon entering school, language is then further developed through spelling, grammar and the enlargement of the vocabulary.
You acquired language one word at a time. That's the same way you learn to improvise, one lick at a time. You get them from books and magazines. Some from recordings. Some are shown to you by other guitarists. All of your favorite guitarists started out copying other players.
You say that you are trying to improvise without a knowledge of modes & scales and that your knowledge of modes is flawed. If this is so, then any attempt to improvise will also be flawed.
You also spoke of problems when trying to play fast. Every metal player I've ever known who could play really fast practiced everything really slowly, using a metronome, gradually raising the tempo until they could play it flawlessly. There are no shortcuts to technique.
Last of all, when you are playing a solo in perfomance, you're playing a song. The chords of the song provide the framework for your solo. You have to follow the chords.
The quickest way to acquire musical vocabulary is to copy solos from your favorite recordings, analyse what was being played against the chords then try to use those phrases in other songs against the same chords. Careful listening to your favorite players will reveal patterns and phrases that get recycled over and over.
I hope this is helpful.
Regards,
Monk
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