Tip: Soloing With Melodic Minor Scale
What exactly is a melodic minor scale? It’s something that makes solos sound interesting and different; but not so different to make them sound wrong.
How do you get that improvised sound that you hear in so many great guitar solos? These lessons dealing with creating your own solos and improvising on guitar. Beginners will probably want to check out the Beginner’s Guide To Soloing series. If you’ve already spent some time on guitar scales, you’ll probably benefit from the series Turning Scales into Solos.
What exactly is a melodic minor scale? It’s something that makes solos sound interesting and different; but not so different to make them sound wrong.
So far in this series we’ve been finding scales to play over major chords. Now we’re going to work out some scales to play over dominant chords.
Is the C major pentatonic the only scale you can use over a progression in C major? Thankfully, no. We have many choices.
Let’s get into a topic that gets a lot of guitarists excited, and some maybe a little frustrated: scales to use for soloing.
Our favorite arranger of Celtic music takes a short summer vacation and brings Guitar Noise readers a little bag of rock guitar riffs based on repeated phrases of notes. These are easy, fun and will add some spice to your soloing. Enjoy!
The rock solo is in some ways the quintessential guitar sound. The dream of playing one really great solo is more or less why we keep strapping up and plugging in. Since the number of really great guitarists is much greater than the length of time given to write an article, we’ll focus here on a few really fantastic players and then discuss how those players inspire us.
This first lesson on improvisation introduces the form of the twelve bar blues, the minor pentatonic scale and the blues scale. There are exercises and even some MIDI backing tracks that you can practice along with!
Let’s take some of the things we’ve discussed in past columns and see them put to good use. If you’d like, you can even learn how to play Lindsay Buckingham’s solo from the original recording of Landslide. But you’ve got to promise to learn something.