How To Play Fast Guitar Solos That Move Effortlessly Across The Fretboard Using 3 Powerful Practice Circuits

Developing killer lead guitar technique might be the first thing on your mind when it comes to playing fast guitar solos. However, one of the most overlooked aspects of speed is being able to track notes mentally before you go to play them.

 

This is achieved not just by developing finger dexterity and solid technique, but by learning how to move effortlessly across the fretboard from one pattern to the next. This helps you utilize your technical speed so that there is no hesitation during your solos (that would normally be a big factor for why you make sloppy mistakes).

 

You get this skill by consistently working to connect different scale or arpeggio patterns with focused training.

 

Get started playing fast guitar solos that flow smoothly all over the neck using these powerful training exercises:

Fast Guitar Solo Training Exercise To Quickly Memorize Three Scales At Once & Make Creatively Soloing Across The Fretboard Feel Easy

 

Exercise Variation #1: Quickly Build Muscle Memory

 

Memorizing scale patterns on the fretboard usually takes a long time because people:

 

  • Practice only one scale
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  • Practice only one scale in one position of the guitar (or in a couple of positions that are far apart)
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  • Practice inefficiently
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Quickly memorizing guitar scales is done by connecting patterns across the fretboard and practicing them efficiently burn them into your brain as fast as possible.

 

This is best done in short, highly-productive bursts to keep you from becoming overwhelmed.

 

Use this killer exercise to do it:

 

 

Step One: Pick three different scales that you want to learn and use in your guitar soloing. Ideally, choose three scales that are next to each other and move up the fretboard. Here are three to get you started:

Guitar Mode Patterns

Step Two: Set a timer for 3 minutes. Use one that you can look at so you see the specific time (find this with a simple Google search).


Step Three: Beginning with the first scale, practice playing the first three notes of the pattern only for 30 seconds, while using any combination of the following:

 

  • Picked notes
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  • Legato notes
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  • Notes picked with heavy picking power
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  • Notes played as fast as possible
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  • Notes played slowly, and melodically
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  • Notes played with vibrato
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Notes played without vibrato

Step Four: Immediately move to the next scale pattern and repeat the previous step (for 30 seconds).

 

Step Five: Immediately move to the last scale pattern and repeat the previous step (for 30 seconds).

 

Step Six: Repeat steps three through five once more until the three-minute timer is up. Rest for a minute.

 

Step Seven: Now repeat steps three through six while playing only on the first two strings of each pattern, like this:

Step Eight: Finally, repeat steps three through six while freely moving between the notes of each different scale pattern before moving to the next one.

 

This exercise only takes about 15 minutes and massively improves your ability to see three different scale patterns on the fretboard and use different techniques with them. This integrates your other skills together making your practice time more efficient.

 

Exercise Variation #2: Improve Your Guitar Soloing Creativity

 

The previous variation helped you integrate different skills into guitar scale practice. This helps you memorize them faster than simply playing up and down a single scale using the same approach every time.

 

You memorize scales across the fretboard AND learn to use them to create music by using the same exercise to work on your guitar phrasing.

 

Here’s how to do it:

 

  1. Use the exact same exercise, only this time create a short 3-4 note guitar lick with the scale in step three.
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  3. Freely improvise to create as many variations of this lick as you can think of within the 30-second time limit of this step.
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  5. Next, repeat this approach with the notes of the scale in the next step.
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  7. As you do this, remember to use the various techniques in step 3 (as well as any other techniques you can think of such as bending or tremolo picking).
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Use this cool guitar phrasing video to get more ideas for how to enhance the expressiveness of your phrases:

Practicing in this manner combines not just multiple scales, but multiple techniques and improvising to train you to play killer guitar solos with ease. This is a lot of fun and you’ll be surprised at the massive amount of improvement you see in your ability to play musical phrases in your solos (in just 15 minutes!).

 

Exercise Variation #3: Use Arpeggios To Enhance Your Scales

 

It’s not to hard to find cool arpeggio patterns when you add and subtract notes from each string in a scale pattern. For example, here are some arpeggios you can make that start on the first note of each guitar scale in variation #1:

Knowing these arpeggios gives you more creative options to help you play fast guitar solos with interesting phrasing.

Use arpeggios with the exercise on this page by doing the following:

 

  • Steps Three Through Six (first playthrough): Play only with the arpeggio patterns.
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  • Steps Three Through Six (second playthrough): Alternate using the arpeggio and the scale patterns.
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  • Steps Three Through Six (last playthrough): Improvise freely using both arpeggios and scales.
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This is very fun and adds a new layer to your guitar soloing creativity. It also makes it easy to rip fast guitar solos by playing an arpeggio and filling in the notes between using scale runs.

 

Practice the variations of this exercise on different days or the same day depending on your guitar practice priorities. It’s easy to play fast and expressive guitar solos across the neck by working on this for less than a couple of weeks.

 

Want to learn more ways to play killer solos that make people’s jaws drop? Become a killer lead guitarist by learning the secrets to creating emotion in guitar solos.