Guitar soloing – Intermediate and Beyond

This course was created using Soundslice. I have put them all together on this page to make it easier to find all eight parts. Clicking on “View Full Version” for each slice will be taken to the Soundslice page to view the full layout.
If you aren’t familiar with Soundslice then simply click on the play button to the left of each slice – you’ll soon get the picture! 🙂

Some Chord Tone Basics
Learning music theory and detailed explanations of everything we do is great, and often necessary, but sometimes it’s also important to just get stuck in and play guitar. This teaches us to listen, train our ears, improve technique and phrasing – all very important.
This is often the area where many guitarists get stuck in the so-called “rut”. What we need is to learn the difference between merely “knowing” a scale and actually “using” a scale.
In this series of workouts we’re going to do just that. Get stuck in, experiment, practise and improve. The scale is A Natural Minor and we’re playing over a backing track with a light rock / Dire Straits kind of feel.

Ghost Notes
Here we’ll take a look at using ghost / muted notes to create rhythmic phrasing, as often used in funk but also well suited to other styles. This is an important technique to learn even if you do not use it much as it helps massively with improving your timing and feel.

Scale Fragments
Here we will look at a simple but effective way of learning a scale across the fretboard. Breaking up scales into smaller parts helps us think about them differently and see them for what they are – just a small selection of notes played in different places.

Experimenting
To improve at anything, we need to experiment. We learn a lot from what we mess around with. Here we’ll take a look at the types of things you can do to play around with ideas and build better solos.

Bends
String bending adds a whole new dimension to your solos. Including string bending with what we have done so far in the previous parts will spice things up further.

Spread the Notes
Using larger intervals to avoid predictable scale-like sounding solos.

Arpeggio Builder
In the previous lessons we have looked at brief ideas of using various scales and arpeggios with short examples of breaking them up and mixing together.
In this lesson we’ll do something similar but build up to bigger and more interesting ideas – but we’ll take things one step at a time. This should help make things a lot clearer about how I go about building these ideas.

Mixing It Up
In the previous lesson we used mainly arpeggios to work our way around the fretboard. This is a great exercise in learning to use larger intervals and avoid sequential scale note playing. In this lesson we will carry on with the same method of gradually piecing ideas together one step at a time but we’ll add some scale ideas as well.

The Backing Track
Key A minor
Tempo 135BPM