Essentials of a Great Guitar Solo

So you want to write a great guitar solo? You want to impress your friends, listeners, and potential fans? Well, to be honest, you have a lot of work ahead of you. Luckily, we can help guide you along the way.

There are three types of guitar solos; bad guitar solos, good guitar solos, and great guitar solos. Bad guitar solos take away from a song, either because they are in the wrong key, display poor execution, or are ill prepared.

A good guitar solo properly fits a song, stays in key, has decent execution, and has proper preparation, but doesn’t grab your attention; it’s just there. A great guitar solo fits a song perfectly, stays in key or implements chromatics tastefully, is properly planned and executed nicely, plus it grabs the listener’s attention, whether through innovation, technical prowess, or smoothness.

So how can you write a great solo?

First off, put down your guitar. Go study your favorite guitarists and see what makes their solos work so nicely. Analyze the techniques they use, the way the follow the scale, which rules they break, and how much their personal flavor affects the overall feel of the solo. When you are done, study some guitarists whom you dislike.

Write down the things that make their solos so unappealing to you. Compare the lists. Chances are, the guitarists you didn’t like actually used a lot of the same techniques as the ones you did like. Study their style to see what made their implementation of the techniques so bad; doing this will help you to avoid falling into the same patterns. Remember, all solos start out with good intent. It’s the execution and style that counts in the end.

Once you have analyzed, taken notes, and compared, the next step involves you. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? When writing a solo, you want to use techniques with which you are familiar only. This will not only help avoid mistakes, but it will also allow you to move on to the next step.

Every great solo focuses on a technique. Too many techniques in a single solo make it hard for a listener to focus. You don’t want to purposely overwhelm your listener, so build each solo around a specific technique. This doesn’t mean that a solo with legato can only have legato; it can have some alternate picking and sweep picking as well, but the main focus should be the legato. This means don’t go from your legato into a ten minute sweeping marathon complete with tapping and economy picking.

While you do want to be creative, exercise intelligent restraint as to not assault your listener’s ear drums. You want to give you listener a reason to listen to your solo, and if you throw all of those reasons into one solo, they will lose interest in your leads.

Finally, plan your solo. Some guitarists -- and I know a few myself-- like to improvise guitar solos. While this may seem like a cool idea, it never comes out sounding great in most forms of music. If you play jazz, then by all means it would be perfect, but for styles such as rock, heavy metal, alternative, and others, fans look for a particular solo in a song. This means you improvisation will be aggravating to them. The key essential to making a great solo is to use your head, so do it!

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