Johnny Hiland Band

Guitars are not straight-forward and simple. They are eccentric and flashy. People want to learn how to play in order to stand out.

To do that, one must first learn how to play a guitar solo in various styles—or at least in their favorite style.

Think for a moment of an average band. Sure, it can be hard to match the charisma of a lead singer, but the guitarist is always close behind in popularity. Ladies tend to go for guitarists because the guitar is awesome and hot! Typically, guys love being the guitarist because they love the solo.

It’s absolutely true! All guys like to daydream about showing off on stage to play guitar solo for five minutes! It’s practically encrypted into every guy’s DNA. It can be awesome. Even as the rest of the band continues to play, they are only playing second fiddle in the amazing creativity and presence of the lead guitarist.

If you are longing to play guitar solo, this guide will break it all down to you in simplest form.

Guitar solo are free from technique, so much of it you can’t learn from one source. When you play solo, it all comes out naturally. In fact, playing guitar solo is the closest you can get to “improve” jazz or blues.

Obviously, a lot of preparation goes into learning how to conquer guitar solo.
To begin with, you must first learn to play at an advanced or expert level. Sadly, no beginner can learn how to play solo within just a few weeks. It’s not that easy. In fact, many solo don’t look difficult, but there’s no way one can play them without complex blends, “pull-offs”, “hammer-ons”, and other expert techniques. You can learn these techniques rather quickly, but it’s more advisable to learn all the basics first.

Once you learn all the fundamentals, then the advanced techniques become much easier. If you’re interested in learning how to play guitar solo, you need to look into “pull-offs” and “hammer-ons”, because you will need to use these 2 techniques often.

Guitar solo use a lot of the high end strings, many of which are notes that are down on the lower 3rd of the guitar neck. Up until this point, you will have more than likely stuck exclusively with the top 3rd section, because that’s the location of the all the chords and power chords. For solo, the focus will change to the lower 3rd section.

Now, you’ll probably run into some complications. For instance, the frets are much closer at the bottom third than they are at the top of the neck. The margin for error is much higher. This is especially true if you have long or thick fingers. Playing guitar solo will really test the speed of your fingers. Don’t think about attempting a solo until you are an expert with strumming and shifting through the strings with ease.

The guitar solo masters will really change the tempo on just a beat and can shift from a slow solo to a frantic pace back and forth easily. However, guitar solo do take time to learn, and are generally not for beginners.

With that said, learning how to play guitar solo can be a wonderful way to expand your horizons, so learn yourself some scales, get familiar with a key or two, and get started learning a few solo!

Copyright Liam Gibson