Learn How to Play Guitar Solos

Our lesson of A Horse With No Name continues with advice on how to spice up your strumming as well as a look at the solo from the original recording.

Even if you consider yourself an expert at guitar solos, you’ll still find the exercise Tom introduces in this mini-lesson eye opening.

Jerry Wyatt's Learn Guitar Fast and Easy is the fastest way to learn to play guitar... including the solos and songs you love. It's a simple and fast solution for learning to play guitar very well.

Saying something with music is what soloing is all about. Here is the first of a two parts from Tom Serb on “Language Based Soloing.”

Tom Hess details the most common reasons why guitar players struggle to create great solos and then gives you tips on massively improving your lead playing.

Making small adjustments to simple 3-note sequences can bring a unique sound to your soloing. Paul Tauterouff shows you how it’s done.

There’s a very simple reason a lot of solos sound more like someone playing scales rather than solos and it all comes down to how you practice. Learn how to solo by learning how to practice soloing.

Creating expressive solos involves a lot more than playing a lot of notes. One of the best ways to practice expressiveness is to use just a handful of notes, as Tom Hess demonstrates in his latest article. This lesson includes a great tutorial video as well.

The pentatonic scale is, without doubt, one of the guitarist’s chief tools. Modes, on the other hand, can be confusing. Paul Tauteroff shows how guitar players who are already familiar with the pentatonic scale can learn and utilize the modes in their lead guitar playing.

Quite often, guitarists solo as if they are paid by the note, totally ignoring phrasing and melody, two key aspects of soloing. Tom Hess gives us a terrific lesson on phrasing, complete with video!

In our latest lesson in this series, we look at a basic rock progression and examine the choices we can make in terms of scales for soloing. Plus we get a look at the Mixolydian mode as well as discovering a new use for the Dorian.

Let’s offer a warm “welcome back” to Nick, who brings us a look at the interlocking relationship of three important creative aspects of musicianship – improvising, composing and transcribing – and how you can use them to move up from being someone who just dabbles with the guitar to a serious musician.

Before moving onward with modes, it’s important to grasp the concept of “target” notes as well as to understand that a target note doesn’t have to be a part of the chord in a chord progression. Here we’ll look at how single notes can used to create far more interesting solos than simply using “safe” notes.

Knowing a single major scale opens the world of modal soloing to you, if you know how to read the signs. We’ll take a look at how to recognize when to use the Dorian scale, and also take a moment or two to compare and contrast it with the minor pentatonic scale.

It only takes a single note to change the minor pentatonic scale into the “blues scale.” And what a world of difference that one note can make! As in the previous lessons in this series, we’ll provide you with MP3 sound files in order to help you create your own solos.

Last time out we sampled the different flavors the major and minor pentatonic scales offered us as tools for soloing over blues progressions. While each had its owns merits, we can create an even more tasteful (not to mention useful) solo when we combine the major scale with the blue note elements of its own minor pentatonic. Come listen!

While it’s vital to use a chord progression to help you decide on a scale, knowing the style or feel of both a song and a scale is just as important. This lesson focuses on the minor pentatonic scale and why it is used so much for blues (and other genres) in major keys.

After spending our last lesson looking at all the notes in a scale, this time we’re going to just look at a few. One of the best things you can do to get going as a soloist is to minimize the number of notes you use in a solo. Focusing on one, two, three or four notes will help you on both rhythm and phrasing, which make a solo a lot more interesting than just stringing as many notes together as fast as you can.

This page answers your questions about scales and includes some examples of how you can use them to spice up your playing.

Putting together solos is not easy for a lot of people, and the conventional teaching (“just use your scales”) doesn’t always make sense when you’re just starting out. In this, the first of a series of articles, we take a listen to the differences in tonal color between the major scale and the major pentatonic.

In his follow up to the basics of soloing, Josh demonstrates the major scale and the pentatonic and their usefulness in helping you improve your lead playing.