Tips on Improving Your Solos
If you’re a rhythm player like me, solos usually consist of either (1) exact knock-offs of those on a track, (2) monotonous and repetitive melodies, interspersed very infrequently with (3) once off, never to be repeated patches of brilliance.
Thank heavens then for guitar teachers like Keith Moore, who share these tips on improving your guitar solos. His main points:
- Learn rhythm
- Practice to jam tracks
- Practice playing less
- Steal from other players
He also mentions that practising scales will help you in the area of repeatability, as you’ll start to learn patterns up the neck, rather than just hammering random notes at will. Nice! Now to practice my guitar jam faces…
The key here is practice, practice, practice. Start slowly. The most important thing is ACCURACY, and not speed. If you play fast but make lots of mistakes, each time you repeat that mistake, you’re actually reinforcing a bad habit.
Also, you learn a lot by trying to learn a classic solo note for note. I started with something easy like Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’. Also, there are products out there (eg. Tascam Guitar Trainer) that can slow down songs making it easier to learn solos.
Here’s a great free open source package that is good for learning songs.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~mp2004/bp/
You can load a track into it (accpets cd, mp3 or wav from memory) and slow it down, speed it up, or even pitch shift it up and down.
Awesome! I suspected there was some freeware out there that did something like that!
Far out, someone read my guitar ramblings! Thanks for stopping by. 😉