Getting Inside Oz Noy's Head and Fingers

Oz Noy's guitar playing is fresh and exciting.I like his concept of laying down a somewhat simple or basic groove and then improvising over it in a modal way.Like he says,just hanging out and grooving on one chord gives you a lot of possibilities when coming to improvising.And besides i am a sucker for the groove thang...anyway!Here is some of his ideas on improvising,he talked about in a Guitar Player article...
“If you’re grooving on one chord you can color it many different ways,” says Noy. “And if you have some different approaches at your disposal, those colors can be extremely vivid. Scales offer some great ways to create different vibes over a one-chord vamp.”
To illustrate his point, Oz has me strum a background groove—a funky mid-tempo rhythm-guitar vamp on the G7 chord in Ex. 1. His lead starts where many guitarists’s solos would—with lines improvised from the minor pentatonic scale fingering in Ex. 2. He’s playing the same five notes that most people taking a blues solo might, but his inflections—his vibrato, bends, attacks, slides, and general pocket—are what set him apart from the average blues/rock hack. There is a solid, articulate snarl to his pentatonic phrases that gives them that elusive vocal quality that is the mark of every great player. What’s more impressive than that, though, is that Noy can deliver that same vocal sound using scales far more jazzy than the blues scale....

“The next color you might hear me play over G7 is the whole-tone scale [Ex. 3],” shares Noy. “Of course, the Mixolydian mode always works too [Ex. 4]. I also like the ‘half/whole’ symmetrical diminished scale [Ex. 5], which I think of as a diminished arpeggio—in this case, G#-B-D-F—with neighbor tones added a half-step below each note. Or, I’ll use a G altered dominant scale [Ex. 6], which, as you may know, is the same fingering as Ab melodic minor. There’s only one other color I’d throw at this vamp, and that’s what I simply call the augmented scale [Ex. 7]. It’s constructed much like the half/whole scale in the sense that it’s simply an arpeggio—this time a G augmented arpeggio spelled G-B-D#—with pitches added a half-step below each note...

“Between those scales, you can create many different sounds, and that alone can take you to new places. And when you start experimenting with phrasing and rhythms, you’ll open up a whole other universe. Plus, you can mix styles—rock, jazz, funk, blues, whatever—though I don’t actual think about music in those terms. The concept of labeling styles is just so limiting.”http://www.guitarplayer.com/article/the-wonderful-world/Jul-06/21660

Some nice info :-) ....

Oz's Newsletter ... http://www.oznoy.com/mailinglist/july07.html
Oz @ Electronic Musician... http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_land_oz/