How to Create Your Own Guitar Solos

Writing leads isn’t easy. There is no trick, no easy route to creating a guitar solo. Solos take time, patience, and planning.

That being said, they aren’t impossible to write. In fact, even the least experienced guitarist can write a guitar solo.

In this article, we will discuss how you can create your own guitar solo.

While guitar solos don’t fit in every song, they do fit nicely in some, and when it comes time to write, there are a lot of questions you need to ask yourself.

The first question should be about your goal; what is your goal with this guitar solo? Do you want to just shred and have absolutely no purpose (like most guitarists apparently do) or do you want to write something intricate?

If you want to shred, there isn’t much planning. In fact, shredding is one of the easiest techniques in guitar; learn a scale and play it as fast as you can. Not much to it. It doesn’t add much to your music either.

Shredding has fallen further and further from music due to this. Playing extremely fast isn’t what makes great music. While there is a time and place for everything, the traditional style of shredding has become almost completely extinct in favor for legato, sweep picking, and tapping.

Why?

They are more fluid. Shredding died out when people started to realize that making a solo flow sounded better than hitting a thousand and one notes as fast as you can pick them.

If you want to shred, keep your usage to a limit. There are a ton of great guitarists who still add a little bit of shred to their solos, but the vast majority keeps it to that small percentage. When you are approaching a guitar solo, decide what you want to do.

When writing a solo, never use all of your techniques at once. If you have an alternate picking section, don’t feel it necessary to then showcase your tapping, your legato, your sweeping, your string skipping, and your economy picking.

If you waste all of your techniques on one solo, listeners will lose all reason to hear your leads. They will become repetitive and boring. Be subtle when possible. Make techniques sound like more than they are. This doesn’t mean that you can only use one technique per solo, but make sure that you only highlight one technique per solo.

It is important that you follow the progression. Too many guitarists fall into the habit of thinking that guitar solos are a free reign. They aren’t. When you are playing a guitar solo, you are still a part of the song. This means you will need to play according to the song. If the song is in the key of C Major, don’t go playing a solo in Gb Major.

Finally, never write a song to a solo. The solo comes after the song each and every time. Constructing a song around a solo is a sure way to write a boring song. This is because all the while you will be more focused on getting to the solo than on the song itself.

Keep these things in mind and you will be on your way to creating a great guitar solo.

Click here to access revolutionary lead guitar course by Robert Lee Molton...