| Learn to Play Guitar Solos |
| Part Two: Guitar Solo Techniques |
In Part one of Learn to Play Guitar Solos, we explored the building blocks of guitar soloing, like the material used (the blues scale and pentatonic scale), the guitar "licks" based on the blues scale, techniques used to play notes (like alternate picking), and more. If you haven't looked at part one of this learning guitar solos feature, I suggest you go back and read it now, in order to fully appreciate what follows.
Learning the blues scale and blues licks are great ways to dive into the art of improvising guitar solos. But, it's really the easiest part of learning to solo on the guitar. Notes and licks can be taught; but what can't be taught is the ability to inject the feeling that really good guitarists manage to convey in their guitar solos. It can be learned, but it is generally best learned through repeated listens to the solos of great guitar players.
One of the things that new improvisers invariably do is try to play far too many notes in their guitar solos. The key to a great guitar solo often lies as much within the space between the notes as it does with the actual notes. Perhaps the greatest example of such an economic approach can be found in the guitar solos of the incomparable BB King, whose improvisations rarely include fast runs of notes. King often spends as much time not playing during his solos as he does playing notes. Think of his approach this way; he's got a great (hopefully) band playing behind him. Even without his solo over top of them, the music sounds great, so any notes King plays are a bonus, that makes the band sound even better. For more insight into the style of King, read the Learn to Play Like B.B. King feature on this site. Try utilizing this sparse approach; play a guitar solo along with any 12 bar blues you have on recording, or with 12 bar blues audio files found on this site, attempting to sound as good while using as few notes as possible. Try playing the same note repeatedly; perhaps only using 1 note for an entire 12 bars. If something sounds good (or bad), try memorizing what it was you played, so you can play it (or not play it) again. Solo along with your favourite guitarists, and try to emulate the feeling (not neccessarily the notes) that they convey when improvising.
Another way to make your guitar solos sound more effective is through the use of several guitar techniques. "Note bending" can add a very expressive quality to guitar solos. Playing the note A, for example, will give you a particular sound, but playing the note G and quickly bending up to, and holding the note A can add a nice color to the note. Usage of this technique will again be helpful to playing economcally, as great sounds can be achieved by simpling bending and holding one note, as opposed to playing ten notes. To learn more, read this lesson on note bending.
One of the most important techniques guitarists should have a firm grasp on is the ability to use various types of vibrato. Playing and holding a note without adding vibrato can often result in the note sounding "dead"; like it's just sitting there, doing nothing. Take the time to listen to all your favorite guitarists; notice that they all use vibrato constantly in their solos, especially when holding a note. In this lesson on vibrato, several types of vibrato are explained and analyzed. Utilization of vibrato will again make sparse soloing more interesting for the listener.
In future articles, we'll further examine the guitar solos of different musical genres, like country, bluegrass, heavy metal, etc. Good luck!
