Most new guitarists quickly learn a scale or two, and they drill them, but when it comes time to actually create a guitar solo they’re flummoxed. Sure, they can play a bunch of notes in the right key, but they can’t make it go anywhere. Read this article for help in turning your ability to play scales into an ability to play great sounding guitar solos.
A great scale to start this with is the minor pentatonic scale (Root, Minor Third, 4th, 5th, Minor 7th. On a guitar, in the key of E, this scale is 0-3, 0-2, 0-2, 0-2, 0-3, 0-3, from low to high). This is a great scale to start with because it has fewer notes, and is highly flexible.
The first key to learning to solo is to start listening to your scale over chords. After all, you won’t be playing your solos in a void. So, for example, if you’re practicing in Em Pentatonic, start with just playing over an E chord. (The minor pentatonic scale works well over the major chords of that key.) Listen to how each note works with the chord. Some work with it, some against it. Focus primarily on the feeling of “tension” – do some notes feel like they’re resolving, while others feel like they’re building tension? (Often, you’ll feel like tension is resolving whenever you return to the root note, but that’s not the only time. Experiment and see!)
Next, start expanding your chord progression. Record several bars of E-A (and loop them, if you have a program like Garageband). Notice how some notes which were “resolution” notes over an E chord are “tension” notes over an A chord. Expand your chord progression out and listen. I can’t tell you exactly what to listen for, because the way in which notes speak to you over certain chords is going to be a big factor in developing your personal style.
The next step is to begin developing licks and phrases. A good way to start developing licks is to play a bar-long phrase, starting and ending on the root note. Experiment. Then build it out to two-bar phrases, starting and ending on the root, but avoiding the root at other times.
Experiment starting on the root note, and ending on the root note one octave higher. Play this over your chord progression. Give yourself a bar to cover that octave, going lower and higher, never repeating the root note. Now two bars. Now two bars one over the E-major chord, and the second over the A-major chord.
Of course, you don’t have to go root-to-root. You could go 5th-to-5th. (B-to-B, in E). As you gain experience, you won’t even have to start and end on the same note. But I’ve found that starting with root-to-root makes the idea of a musical phrase very clear, it’s a short musical journey. And that music journey is the substance at the heart of a good guitar solo.
