How To Play A Fast Solo On Guitar Without Making So Many Mistakes

It feels amazing to play fast guitar solos off the top of your head… when you do it cleanly. Making tons of mistakes turns a killer solo into a frustrating experience. There are many ways to eliminate the mistakes in your solos to make playing with speed feel fun and satisfying.

Fact: Guitarists often struggle to play fast guitar solos clean due to various factors besides technique.

You don’t need to “fully master” every guitar technique in order to play fast guitar solos that sound awesome. Instead, improve your technique while also paying close attention to these key concepts:

Giving Yourself Time To Think Leads To Better Guitar Solos With Less Mistakes

The majority of mistakes, missed notes or awkward melodies occurring during guitar solos are due to “not having enough time to think”.

Giving yourself more time to think is an important skill that can be practiced like any other. Practicing this frequently overlooked skill is a little-known trick for quickly improving your guitar solos.

This video explains why giving yourself more time to think helps you play better guitar solos:

How to apply this concept now to play better fast guitar solos:

 

  1. Take up to 2 minutes to create a short phrase that you can play easily. For example: a 3-5 note pentatonic minor lick.
  2.  
  3. Next, add a one or two notes to the phrase you made. While doing this, begin thinking about the new notes you will play after playing the first note of the original phrase.
  4.  
  5. This can be done by doing things like thinking of how you want the notes to sound (if you have a good ear), what frets you want to play or what techniques you want to use.
  6.  

Repeat this process until you’ve played 10 variations of your original lick. This gradually trains your brain to think ahead, giving you more time to process what you’re playing.

 

Result: It’s easier to play guitar solos more creatively, and you’re less likely to make mistakes while playing with speed that occur due to not knowing what to play next.

Say As Much As You Can With As Little As You Can To Make Your Solos More High Quality

 

What is one of the most common lead guitar mistakes that people make while playing solos (especially at fast speeds)?

 

Answer: Wasting a lot of notes.

 

Your goal should be to get the absolute most expression possible out of every note. The more you make every note count, the higher quality your guitar solos become.

 

Start playing better guitar solos by first playing just ONE amazing note.

 

Take 1 minute to play a single note as expressively as possible by:

 

  • Playing it with different rhythms
  •  
  • Using tremolo picking with speed to make it more intense
  •  
  • Pre-bending it and letting the note fall back to its original pitch (on the fret being fretted)
  •  
  • Using different kinds of vibrato such as wide or narrow to give the note a different expressive feeling
  •  
  • Picking with heavy picking power or light picking power
  •  
  • Palm muting
  •  

From here, expand to playing TWO notes using the same approach to get as much expressive power from each one as possible.

 

Working on this for just a couple minutes a day has a massive positive effect on your guitar phrasing and solos. While playing fast guitar solos, you become less likely to waste notes and the notes you play become higher quality.

 

As you practice this with more than one note, pay attention to how each note feels when played after the other. This begins to train your ear so you know what a note sounds like before you even play it. This gives you more time to think about what you want to play next (as mentioned in the first section of this article).

Play Fast And Smooth Guitar Solos By Becoming A Fretboard Wizard

 

Nothing is more frustrating while playing fast guitar solos than getting lost on the fretboard. This leads to awkward phrases and unintentionally playing notes outside of the scale. Avoid this by learning how to smoothly move across the fretboard with different connected patterns.

 

It’s easy to think ahead and not get lost while soloing when you develop a clear map of the fretboard in your head. This gives you more time to concentrate on playing creative guitar phrases.

 

Here is an example of three scale patterns that can be combined to smoothly move up the fretboard while playing a guitar solo:

Adjacent Modes On Guitar

These 3 scale patterns of Major, Dorian and Phrygian all contain the same notes. What makes them different is simply that they begin and end on different notes. So D major begins/ends on D, E Dorian on E and F# Phrygian on F#.

 

While improvising/soloing knowing these patterns gives you a lot more fretboard space to work with so you aren’t confined to just one position.

For example, this tab shows all 3 patterns being used together:

Practice combining different patterns together like this by slowly adding one or two notes of the adjacent pattern to the one you’re using. Eventually, you learn to seamlessly move from one to the next. This makes playing fast and creative guitar solos feel effortless.

 

Note: Learn more about modes and scale patterns by working together with an experienced guitar teacher who specializes in teaching rock/metal.

Your guitar soloing skills go through the roof by practicing just a little each day using the ideas in this article. This makes it much easier to play with technical skill and speed without making so many mistakes.

 

Learn more incredibly powerful ways to play killer solos right away using this guitar soloing course.