How To Play Guitar Solos: An Overview

This article comes from Mitch Wilson for Guitar Tricks and 30 Day Singer!

One of the reasons the electric guitar became so popular was its ability to cut through the mix of a song and really stand out. A musician can play a solo on nearly any instrument, but with a guitar, they have access to a style that emulates vocals well, thus allowing us to copy emotions! Here is an overview on the basics of how to play a guitar solo.

What Is a Solo?

A solo is a part of a song or composition where one lone person or section is the primary player. In modern music, there is often a continued accompaniment of the rhythm section, as that is necessary to keep the beat going. Many rock and pop tunes of the mid to late 20^th century had some form of solo section, often guitar, sax, or synth.

Improvising is the goal of the solo; it needs to feel and appear like it came out of nowhere. But the truth is most of the greatest improvisation in history is rehearsed! It is necessary to practice the aspects and technique of a solo constantly. Of course, it is possible to have inspiration during the playing, but that only comes with knowing the part inside and out.

Some music theory is important to keep your solo sounding okay; when playing along with others, you need to be in the right key and scale. There are times in jazz and rock when we have a key change or leave the tonic, but as a beginner, keep it simple. A Circle of Fifths chart and some scale formulas will help when learning to solo on a guitar.

It can also help to study intervals and scales as their fundamental properties are often how we get an overall feeling or vibe in music. The pentatonic scale is great for blues, rock, and metal, while major scales have more of an uplifting vibe suitable for pop, folk, and traditional music.

But of course, all these styles can be mixed, and that is where music theory gets frustrating. Just remember there are only 12 notes that repeat, so nothing is that difficult; there are just multiple ways to get the same answer with music!

Guitar Solo Techniques

One of the best parts about guitar solos is the expression that one can bring into their playing. Strings can be manipulated in ways that are harder than playing keys, wind, and brass instruments. Any guitar technique is useful in a solo, but there are some basic ones to get you started.

• Be sure you have a proper guitar that is set up and tuned correctly with good intonation. The notes you fret should play correctly. If not, your chords and solos will sound off, and no matter how much you practice, it will all be in vain.
• A solo on an acoustic and electric will have different approaches, and you can do a lot more on the latter thanks to amplification and gain. The techniques will be mostly the same except for the limitations that come with only an acoustic. You can shred on an acoustic or play incredibly fast flamenco flourishes, but you will always have a quicker decay of the sound.
• Hammer-ons, pull-offs, bends, slides, slurs, and vibrato will be essential techniques that will provide most of the sounds you need as a beginner. Adding little flourishes with your fretting hand will give the solo feeling, rhythm, and more depth.
• Your pick movement will often be an up-and-down alternate motion to get an efficient pattern going. The picking hand must strike the right note as the fretting hand presses it, and then the hand immediately needs to be ready for the next note. Play your solos slow at first to keep your picking technique from getting sloppy.
• Know when to add space to the notes with pauses and rests! Some of the greatest guitarists play amazing solos with very few notes and learn to be emotive by leaving music out on occasion!
• Use your pinky as much as possible without injuring yourself. It will take some exercise to get the digit to be useful, but it will greatly open your fretting abilities with proper control of the little finger!
• Palm muting and other forms of string silencing are needed to keep errant noise out of a clean solo. If a note needs to end right after the pick or finger plucks it, then we need to find a way to mute it immediately. Once you have gained experience and start moving into harder concepts like shredding, you will see it is multiple synced movements of both hands: fretting, picking, and muting.

How to Get Started Playing Guitar Solos

Here are some ways to get started if you have little or no experience with playing a guitar solo.

• Look up guitar tabs of your favorite solos and just dive in. If you struggle, move to the next song! Once you find an easy one that works, keep that as a practice tune and perfect it. Continue to attempt to play solos you hear and like. This is the original method for learning popular guitar: turn the music on and start trying to copy it by ear!
• Pick a scale and play along to a drum rhythm or beat; often, the blues scale is a great one to start with. Start ascending the scale and then descending along with the rhythm you have chosen. Keep it slow; the shredding is a long way off! Begin to add in some hammer-ons or pull-offs and change the scale up, play a small portion and repeat it before adding other notes in. If you stay in the scale, most intervals and movements will work. The pentatonic scales are also very easy to use, with little room for error.
• Pick a chord progression like G-C-D (key of G) or maybe C-Am-F-G (key of C) and start playing arpeggios on each chord. This will be the same as playing the right scale, as these guitar chords are made up of scales. Arpeggios are just the notes of the chords played individually and are the starting point for great solos. Try playing chord progressions in different positions along the fretboard so you get to know the notes.
• If you are playing an electric, then be sure to practice with a clean signal, even if you plan later to use lots of distortion and overdrive! If you can’t hear your mistakes, it’s hard to fix them, so keep the amp clear during your initial practice.
• There are many patterns and systems out there that can help some students with learning the fretboard and soloing. Try them out and see what works; it’s always helpful to study new ideas. Turn on a backing track or drum beat and just experiment with different solo methods.

Guitar soloing is not hard if you take it slow and do not jump ahead of your abilities. That is often the biggest cause of failure - trying to bite off more than you can chew. Keep it slow and simple at first. During your guitar lessons, practice arpeggios, scales, chords, and known songs every day, making small improvements. It’s a grind, but if you keep at it, eventually you will be comfortable with the notes and techniques needed to bust out a good guitar solo.