I may be biased, but as a gigging musician, I often think that improvisation is where the magic happens.
It’s not that it’s difficult to improvise - in fact, I think confidence may be more of a barrier than skill - but learning the basics can help you to get started, and beginning with a 12 bar blues progression is helpful.
In improvisation, less is more, especially when playing over a blues progression. Being able to pick out chord tones in your licks is the aim - and this is what makes the difference between noodling around and great playing.
With blues improvisation, you’ll only need to think about three chords, each of which only has three or four notes. When you’re working out how to get to grips with this, remember that you can use the straight bar positions at the 12th fret, 5th fret and 7th fret to get to the root and third of each chord quickly. This is helpful, but it can often lead us to get stuck in a rut here.
You can shake it up and get into some seriously cool improvising when you change your approach and begin using these barre positions as references to help you find the chord tones in other places, such as your favourite scale positions.
I share lots of useful tips in my Facebook group, Learn Slide Guitar, and my 90 day course, Slide Success, will give you everything you need to be a confident slide guitar player within three months. You can book your free one to one session today to get started: https://calendly.com/philliphenrymusic/slide-success-discovery-call