How to Play Great Guitar Solos

So you want to play great guitar solos. You can do it if your committed to spending some serious quality time with your guitar. Read on for tips and tricks to being better than good and actually pretty great at soloing.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• A guitar
• Internet Access
• A metronome
• Cd's

1. A guitar solo takes up space in any song so it should be worth listening to. While a lot of great music came out of the 1990's the value of guitar solos bottomed out. Solos became uninteresting and seemed to mimic the vocal line of the part it was played over. When writing a solo you should spend a good amount of time studying the guitar riff and/or bass line it will be played over. Study the notes within the chords often times playing a Dorian scale would be a better choice than a natural minor scale. Look for commonalities within a set of chords as it relates to your choice of scale. You should also keep the key of the part in mind (for instance the key of E)

2. Your scale vocabulary should be extensive. At the least you should memorize the seven Major/Minor Modes, The five postions of the Minor pentatonic scale and of the Major pentatonic scale, and the Minor blues scale. For more motivated guitarists also learn the seven modes of the Melodic Minor and Jazz Melodic Minor scales (14 total), and learn exotic scales like harmonic minor. Fretboard diagrams of scales are available free on the internet.

3. Arpeggios are excellent as well. An arpeggio contains the notes of any given chord put played separately rather than at once. Arpeggios are great for licks in your solos. Find these diagrams on the internet for free as well. The more scales and arpeggios you know the more you can do with your guitar.

4. Many guitarists want to increase their speed so lets talk about how to do it. Purchase a metronome for your local music shop(about 15 bucks). A metronome will play a continuous clicking beat at any tempo you set it to. Now play exercises on your guitar. They can be scales or patterns for instance playing frets 1-2-3-4 from the low E to the high E and then reverse the pattern coming down and doing this up to the 12th fret and then back down. There are various patterns like 1-2-4 1-3-4 1-4 its really endless. Now practice with your metronome at a doable speed a speed that you can play cleanly at. Increase your speed over the following weeks. This improves muscle memory and makes playing fast easy.

5. Playing tastefully is even more important than playing fast. Instead of regurgitating your exercises during a solo try to come up with fast licks that don't follow the note order of a scale or pattern. Try playing a short fit of fast notes between slower passages rather than cramming 1000 notes into one solo. A solo is a song with in a song not a chance to show off. Another great way to play fast is to pick one note and hammer-on the other two. You can work this across the string and then reverse it with pull-offs on the way down. For those who cant pick as fast as they want this will sound fast and smoother but not as chunky.

6. How do we play tastefully. Learn techniques for accentuating guitar licks. Vibrato is a simple way to make your guitar sing. A pinch harmonic (pick squeal) makes a guitar squeal and sounds cool. Finger tapping and pick tapping are exciting techniques that are easy to do and sound terrific. Sweep picking adds beautiful thick textures to solos. Before you hit these techniques make sure you have the basics under your belt (pull-offs, hammer-ons, trills, pick scraping, and volume swells) even feed back has its place once in a while. These techniques when done right will add flare to your solos.

7. The whammy bar or tremolo bar has been thrown to the way side but it serves a great purpose and may come back in the years to come. If you have one use it. A whammy bar is capable of many different tricks and when not over used can pump up your solos. You can pluck a string and bring it down slowly, you can hit harmonics and bring them up or down for a laser like effect, or you can bounce you sound up and down by pulling or pushing your whammy bar up and down very fast.

8. Improvisation is needed for playing and writing good solos. This means you can come up with good licks on the spot or you may have an arsenal of great licks ready for any given situation. Guitar Center sells a great collection of Cds called backing tracks. This CD provides an entire band performing and you can practice your solos over these tracks to become better. You can do this with your favorite bands Cds. Some computer programs are capable of removing the vocal track from any song. You may even record a riff to practice a solo over on garage band or another computer program.

9. Find the guitarists you appreciate. Listen and learn from their solos. There are processors that can slow down fast solos so you may learn them. Learning someone else's solo may help you develop your own style. No matter what kind of music your into finding the guitarists you like will help you play what you like them playing. Subscribe to Guitar World or Guitar Player. Its motivating to read about other guitarists and these magazines always contain some lessons on soloing.

10. Videos are extremely helpful to the budding lead guitarist so utilize them. Youtube is a great free resource for tutorials but i prefer instructional dvds put out by pro- player and designed for students. Your favorite guitarist may have his own lesson dvd. This is a great chance to learn from someone you like to listen to.

11. For the extremely motivated listen to solos by other instruments. The Saxophone for instance produces interesting motifs that can also be played on a guitar. You can listen to many other instruments playing solos and translate those ideas back to the guitar!

12. I hope this article helped. Remember being great doesn't happen overnight and requires a lot of patience. Learn as much as you can about scales, arpeggios, and modes. Don't overdo or become reliant on one trick like pick tapping. Being great means you'll have to have a giant arsenal of techniques and tricks to play exciting solos. Finally practice whenever you can and take breaks when and if you feel hand and finger pain. Some guitarists have to quit because they develop carpal tunnel syndrome and their hands are permanently affected by sharp pains when using finger muscles.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't give up
• Practice truly does make perfect
• Learn as much as you can
• Learn about the risks of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
• Avoid sounding exactly like your favorite guitarist
• Speed isn't everything

[shreddy]

on 7/4/2009 I agree, backing tracks are a great way to develop your phrasing.
Besides Guitar Center which has great ones, there are a few online websites offering quality tracks. This one specializes in educational backing tracks helping you master different scales: http://www.guitarplayback.com