Welcome to video #9 on the Lead Guitar Quick-Start Series. In this lesson I’m going to give
you some tips for building your own guitar solos. And these tips are going to be important
because the last thing you want is for your solos to sound like you’re just practicing
through a scale or an exercise. If you’re just jumping into the series on this lesson
for the first time, I really recommend that you go back to the first lesson in this series
and complete all of them because a lot of the foundational stuff we’re going to be
using is covered throughout all of those lessons. In this lesson we’re going to be covering
concepts like phrasing, repeating themes, leaving space, building your solos dynamically
and playing over simple chord changes too. The first thing I want to talk to you about
is phrasing. It’s often good to structure your solos kind of like you’re talking to
someone. If I’m talking to someone, I don’t just talk in a monotone voice all the time
and just keep running all my sentences together until the conversation is over. Like, that doesn’t
make much of any sense. That’s the equivalent of playing a guitar solo, just playing up
and down a scale without stopping, right? What you do when you talk to somebody is you
leave pauses, you have inflections in your voice and rest times where you wait and that’s
the same thing with your guitar solos. If you stop here and there and have inflections
go up and down, it makes your solo a lot more interesting.
The next thing I want to talk to you about is repeating a theme throughout your solo.
You’re not always going to want to do this but sometimes it’s nice to have a little
recurring theme that can kind of tie your solo together and make it more cohesive. What
this also does naturally is it kind of helps your phrasing that we just talked about. It
gives you a space for pauses when you repeat a little theme like this. You’ll see what
I’m talking about in the solo that we’re going to learn in the next lesson. There’s
a repeating theme that’s really obvious that gives a solo a nice overall sound.
One thing that’s kind of hard for us guitar players to do is leave space in between notes.
A lot of times we just want to be able to play through a scale or a fast lick, just
because we’ve been working on it, but sometimes in your solos you’re going to want to leave
space just to keep the listener engaged and keep them tied in to what you’re playing.
In the solo that we’re going to be learning, there’s a little theme stated like I said
and then there’s a little space where you’re not playing anything and then you’re going
to restate that theme again. Another way to make your solos more interesting and engaging
to the listener is to build them dynamically. And what I mean by that when I say build your
solo dynamically, you can either start off quieter and more sparse, build a little more
and by the end you have some room to just be screaming for a fast lick or a louder part,
and this isn’t always going to be the case for every solo but it’s a great tool to
pull out when you have a song that’s more emotional or you want to create kind of a
crescendo, simple to a climax in your solo, right? You can think of it as a movie script. Movies
generally don’t stay up all the time. Even the best action movies have lulls, peaks and
valleys in them in a plot. So it starts off slow and maybe gets a little bit more exciting
then there's a climax and a resolution. The next tip I want to give you is to start
playing over the chord changes and by that I mean you need to adjust the notes or scales
that you’re playing to fit over the chords that are happening in the song that you’re
playing over. In the case of the solo we’re going to learn in the next lesson, the two
chords in the jam track that we have are G and an E minor. What we’re going to do is
adjust our scales or our note choices to fit over the G chord when it’s playing, so we’re
going to use G major scales and G major pentatonic scales, and when the E minor chord comes around,
we’re going to switch to an E minor pentatonic scale.
That’s a really simple example but it’s an awesome way to start thinking about actually
choosing your notes instead of just playing through random scales. So those are just a few
useful tips in general for soloing that are going to come in handy throughout your guitar
career especially in the next lesson where I’m going to teach you the solo that I’ve
written out that applies everything that we’ve learned up to this point. And of course these
tips won’t apply to every solo but they are a good starting point to help you make
your solos a bit more musical instead of sounding like you’re just playing through scales.
So in the next lesson we’re going to learn a solo that I’ve written out for you, your
first guitar solo, so be excited for that. If you have any questions about these concepts
that I talked about in this lesson, leave them below and I’ll get back to you. You
can also email me nate@guitarsystem.com. See you.