Guitar Solo Improvisation 1

To many guitarists, playing guitar solos may be a difficult aspect of guitar playing due to the involvement of many guitar techniques. However, I personally believe that the hardest part of playing the lead guitar is to become a good guitar soloist. When I started playing in a band 3-4 years ago, we were doing a lot of cover songs. I could learn to play technically difficult guitar solos and replicate other songs with great fidelity. However, during casual jam sessions, I often found myself having great difficulty in improvising or creating my own guitar solo improvisation. It dawned onto me that all along I wasn’t good at playing guitar solos, I was good at practicing solos and copying other guitar soloists. Being a self taught guitarist, I started scouring the Internet and consulted my guitar playing friends for ideas to get started on solo playing.

In this series of guitar solo improvisation lessons, I will share with you guys the tips and hints that I had adopted. For the first lesson, I will try to explain the basic concepts in guitar solo playing as simple as I can. This is to help those who are totally clueless and new to guitar solo playing. However, I would require you to read the guitar scales lessons if you haven't done so.

Soloing improvisaion over chord progressions with guitar scales

A lot of guitar lessons online talk about using some scales to solo over chord progressions and leave you hanging there. In my personal experience, learning the guitar scales are not difficult. The most difficult part is to understand what notes to play and when to play the notes when faced with a progression. I am going to use a familiar | Cmaj | Amin | Fmaj | Gmaj | chord progression to explain some basics of soloing. The key of this progression is in C major.

When I just started to learn guitar soloing, I found it very discerning that many lessons and “gurus” state that the C major scale can be used to solo over this chord progression. Technically speaking, we could use the C major scale over this chord progression with no possible wrong notes. However, if the notes C major scale are played randomly across the chord progression, you’ll find that there are some notes that may not sound right over particular chords. Try it out for yourself.

The reason why some of the notes sound wrong is due dissonant tones caused by intervals. For example, if you play a F or A note over C major chord, the notes seems to clash against the C major chord.

For a start and intro to guitar solo playing, the easiest way to begin is to always land on “safe” notes on each chord change. The “safe” notes of the C major chord are C E G; “safe” notes of Amin are A C E etc…… In a nutshell, landing on notes that make up the chords you are soloing over are SAFE and will generally sound good.

Download .gtp5 ( Right-click Save Target as... )

Download the .gtp5 chord progression and I will show you a really simple solo that anyone can do. Use the practice track and play your own solos over it. Don’t worry about trying anything fancy, I want you to practice and focus on landing safe notes during chord changes.

Playing a guitar solo is not as difficult as you might think it is. With some theory knowledge and lots of practice, you should be able to play some simple solos. In latter improvisation lessons, I will show you some tricks to further expand on the ideas that were thought here. As Steve Jobbs of Apple Inc. puts it, “Start small, Think BIG”, you shouldn’t worry about playing at 320km/h or doing extraordinary guitar techniques for your guitar solo at this moment.

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