How do you learn solos?

Sterile Fish

i play guitar, and find it hard to learn solos, i just want ppl to tell me what method they use to sit down and learn solos. I've been playing for nearly 2 years now, but find it hard to learn fast lead guitar parts, i dont know, mayb my method is jst wrong, but i want to know how other people do it anyway,

thanks

Giblet

Knowing what mode and scales the solo uses helps, as you can "guess" how to play it as you hear it. Speed is just practice.

Jaicster

Yeah thats the proper way but if you haven't got a ****e about scales and stuff (like me)

Play the solo slowly over and over this way u kinda build up a muscle memory and slowly increase the speed. Don't try to learn it at full speed, take it bar by bar, then put all the bits together.

Learn the solo so you can play it tightly and cleanly then work on the speed, different picking techniques can help you get more speed, if possible try and use your lil finger that can help with reach problems.

Always warm up before playing some thing really fast like 16th notes or something because if you don't your fingers will fall off at the 4 year mark.

(to warm up take a scale, or some picking piece of music and play it slowly over and over and build up a bit of speed each time.)

That Guitar Pro Program every one is telling you to get has a speed trainer in it (very useful) and at the same time you can see the scales on a fret or keyboard.

Gordon

What Jaicster said. Also try and maybe get yourself some way of playing the music back at slow speed so that you can hear the solo well when playing at slow speed.

The greats learned the same way we all did, even the best started out fluffing notes.

Morello

A good place to start is a pentatonic minor because it sounds well almost everywhere:

E.G.

Pentatonic in A minor: A C D F G A

The position is:

E String: 1 4
A String: 1 3
D String: 1 3
G String: 1 3

(You'll work out yourself B and E because I play bass.... )

However, here is an easy approach to scales:

Let's say for example that the song is in C major.

The basic scale is C D E F G A B C

Now, if instead of starting from the C you start from the D you have D E F G A B C D. This scale has exactly the same notes but sounds different!

So you can try:

1) C D E F G A B C
2) D E F G A B C D
3) E F G A B C D E
4) F G A B C D E F
5) G A B C D E F G
6) A B C D E F G A
7) B C D E F G A B

Each of this scale has a specific name, sorry but I'm foreigner and I don't know english names for scales

What matters is that ALL of them will work in the tonality of C, D-, E-, F, G, A-, B- with slight differences in the harmony (E.G. The G is actually a G7 and F is actually F7maj, etc.)

The cool thing is that when you learn them all, then it will be easy for you to tell "good" notes from "bad" notes in a certain tonality, so you can mix them up and experiment, being sure that any note you pick will sound right.

You can find more here:

http://www.theorylessons.com/home.html

Good work! A.

Sterile Fish

and one more question, what sort of excercises can i do to strenghthen my wee finger? its soo feeble and it flails about mindlessly ! (pretty much liek the rest of me) it never does what i want it too, i also have wierd shaped wee fingers (they bend inwards) so its really hard to reach low notes with it

superconor

i find the way to strenghen my pinkie, (ive just started this myself),
is to play power chords with your pinkie and just play a few and do this everytime you pick up the guitar, then you should be doing more and more. sterile fish, even if you slag me in the north section. i know what you mean. keep practsing

Sterile Fish

do u mean, 2 finger power chords, replacing the third finger with the wee finger? or do u mean three finger power chords? cos the three finger power chords strentghen it, but wont help flexibility, and it wanst mean to offend really, i was just in a crappy mood and took a dig at teh first person i could, sorry

Don1

Get the bones of it from the tab. Then I ad lib it to my hearts content and when it sounds damn close I go back to the tab and fine tune it. Works well when the tab is impossible to play whilst reading.