How To Play Fast Guitar Solos That Flow Like A River
Do your guitar solos sound more like robotic exercises than
actual music?
This is very common, you are not alone.
Good news:
It doesn’t take a super long time to learn how to play great solos that are musically expressive.
Use the concepts below to make your guitar solos flow from note to note effortlessly:
Practice Thinking Ahead During Guitar Solos
The majority of guitarists play solos note to note. This makes it very hard to think in the moment and play creatively.
Adopting this approach will make a massive difference in the quality of your guitar soloing.
Find out how to not get lost in your guitar solos by thinking ahead using the tips in this video:
Quick Guitar Soloing Tip:
Playing only one phrase per chord can easily become to repetitive.
Don’t be afraid to play more than one phrase per chord while
soloing over a backing track (or you can make each phrase end on the next
chord).
Varying the phrase length gives your guitar playing more variety and generally makes it sound better.
Learn The Emotional Qualities Of Individual Scale Degrees
When you know how a certain note feels over a certain chord, you can command emotion in your guitar solos with ease.
Having this skill makes it much easier to quickly decide on which notes you want to end a lick on, which ones you want to hold longer or which ones you want to string together in a flashy technical run.
It all begins by being able to identify the emotional qualities of different notes (or just “how tense or relaxed they feel”).
Improve Your Fretboard Knowledge
Having excellent fretboard visualization makes guitar playing a breeze.
Question:
How do you memorize the fretboard?
Learn how different scale patterns and arpeggios connect together.
Here’s a couple of ways to get started:
Memorize The Modes And Learn To Use Them Together
A mode is a scale that begins than a different note than the
root.
For instance:
C Major = C D E F G A B
If we start from E instead of C, you get E Phrygian:
E F G A B C D
Notice how the notes are exactly the same, only you center your focus around the second note of the scale instead of the first.
On the fretboard, this allows you to expand from one area of the guitar all the way across the neck.
Practice learning these modes and moving back and forth between their patterns and you’ll soon be playing all over the fretboard with ease!
Bonus tip: Invest time during guitar practice into finding different arpeggios within scale patterns to fill in your fretboard vision and make your soloing flow more seamlessly.
Make It A Priority To Work On Guitar Phrasing
Guitar phrasing is critical for playing expressive licks and solos.
Keep in mind: the goal of learning things like scales or techniques or music theory is to learn how to use them to create music.
Practice with these approaches to make your guitar solos sound very expressive with little effort:
·
Practice scales by improvising with the notes in
addition to simply playing through the patterns like normal.
·
Practice combining arpeggios with scales until
your solo no longer sounds like “arpeggios and scales”… it just sounds like
“music.”
· Practice playing chords in progressions, by combining them with scale runs and by improvising with them using different rhythms.
Working on the things discussed in this article really goes a long way to help you play better guitar solos with speed and expression.
Want to learn more ways to play emotionally powerful solos?