How To Guitar Solo

Learn How To Create Great Guitar Solos

Many people learning how to play the electric guitar want to learn to solo on guitar. They either want to create their own solos or be able to play the solos of their favourite guitarists.

The first thing to remember is not to run before you can walk. This doesn't mean it's going to take ages before you can reach your goal. You just need to slow it down and learn some guitar principles first.

If you want to copy other guitar players solos, the good news is that it's easy to do. All you need to do is go on the internet and download the tablature to the songs you want to learn to play. Someone else has already done the hard work for you. You just learn how to read guitar tabs and you can learn the songs.

I've made that sound a lot easier than it actually is. Some solos are quite tricky to learn. One tip is to break them down into smaller pieces. Work on playing the same phrase at a slow tempo in the beginning and increase speed while improving it until you get it just right before you move onto the next piece. If in increasing speed you start making mistakes, slow it down again until you get it right.

Creating your own solos will need a lot more knowledge. You will need to learn scales, chords, and notes. You should be doing this anyway. Doing this will make the difference between you being an OK guitarist and a good guitarist and will teach you about improvisation.

The pentatonic scales and the different scale positions are usually the ones that are learnt first. From this you will be able to put together guitar licks, riffs, and solos,  and generally be able to improvise.

One common scale that was learnt is the blues scale. It's only one note different to the pentatonic scale. Many top guitarists like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page started out by playing 12 bar blues.

Once you've learnt the basics and got past the beginner stage, you can start learning the guitar solo techniques such as bends, slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs, alternate picking, etc. This will improve your lead guitar playing and your soloing techniques will improve with practice.