How do you play a great solo? Playing Guitar Questions
You play a great solo by practicing until you know it so well that you can’t make a mistake. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it doesn’t have to be fast, but it should feel as if it has movement and be played with the emotion that matches the groove.
One way to get good at playing great solos, is to write a new solo everyday. This is the same as practicing spontaneity in slow motion. The advantage of making solo writing a part of your practice routine, is that it gives you the opportunity to explore different tangents. You can go way off the main stream, or stay in the pocket. If you have a recorder, you can play it against the groove and listen back to it. Sometimes that will help spark a new creative direction. Listening back will also help you decide whether the solo has any life in it. In other words, is it starting some place and then going through a wave and ending up somewhere bigger.
If your solo is sounding flat and lifeless, then take your best ideas and add some technique to them. I will sometimes just pick a technique at random and see if I can tweak a lick with it. It’s actually quite a bit of fun particularly when the lick seems completely foreign from the technique. For example, let’s say you have a classic rock-n-roll 3 note rapid fire and you want to somehow turn that into an arpeggio…….and, just for fun…let’s add slides. When you do this kind of exercise, there are no rules. Play what sounds good to you. You don’t need to spend hours a day doing this. 10 minutes in the morning will suffice. It can be anytime, but morning seems to work best for me and that is why I suggest it. Your mind is fresh, your not tired, and you can usually find a little bit of quiet time for yourself before the day breaks loose.
Another Way
Another great way to improve your soloing is to listen to great soloists. Of course, listen for the sheer enjoyment of it, but also listen to it and try to analyze what’s going on. Are they playing on a minor pentatonic scale ascending, then doing a right hand tapping flurry, follow by a huge slide up the neck, and then a squeal. You can use whatever adjective you think fits, but the idea is to see if you can come up with a frame work of what the soloist is thinking.
A Secret
Here is another secret, most solos are not completely ad lib. The soloist has played the solo many times and has a frame work that they are working from. In many cases, that frame work was a note for note solo at one point or another. Something that they sat down and crafted. Once they “know the solo so well that they can’t make a mistake,” they can ad lib within that frame work. I hope that makes sense to you. Some players are so good at this, and so in the zone, that it is hard to believe that they are not just channeling the cosmos. Stevie Ray Vaughn was really good at this. He played like he must have lived with a guitar in his hands every waking hour. When you listen to Stevie’s performance from concert to concert, the solos are the same but he knows them so well that he can play around with them within the solo framework itself.
Jazz Cats
Jazzcats do this with a little different approach. Most have phrases worked out that they can apply to different chord structures, or progressions. They have these nuggets of phrases that they can use as targets. Something that they are headed toward or away from. They often use chromatic ideas to move between one phrase to the next. It’s a little looser framework that allows for more ad lib.
Anyone Can Solo
You don’t have to be a phenomenal guitar player to play a great guitar solo. You just have to be phenomenal at playing the solo that you are playing. Not all solos are super fast and not all solos are super technical.
Playing Guitar Questions Page
Guitar players frequently have questions about how come they can’t sing and play guitar at the same time. Another guitar playing question often asked is “How do you strum rhythm?”
Questions come up concerning technique. How do you execute bends, slides, slurs, hammer pulls, trills, swells, whammy bar tricks, harmonics, right hand tapping, and so on. How do you use these in real time and in actual solos?
What’s a good practice routine? There is not going to be one shoe fits all routine because we are all different and have different goals. Even so, there are going to be some general guidelines that can help you refine your routine and focus on those things that will move you forward.
Playing Guitar Questions are as numerous as there are grains of sand…….well….maybe not that many, but there are a bunch of questions. That is one of the things that is so fascinating about guitar. It is an instrument that is not finite in the sense that one day you sit down and say….OK, I have it completely figured out. There is always something new to look at and explore!
