SOLOING

 

- INTUITION -

 

Before I start the article "Intuition" first a few general hints on soloing.


  • It's not always necessary to play and practice everyday, but regular practice will keep your level stable and prevents the loss of horny skin on your fingertips. So playing every other day is a good idea.
  • Last time I suggested to practice extra while watching t.v. Of course, this is also possible while reading a magazine or even surfing on the internet. You can practice pure technical stuff like vibrato and scales with your fretting hand only.
  • When practicing with a drum computer, try to play an interesting pattern with only 6 or 8 notes and vary the timing, bends, vibrato and the way you pick. It makes you more conscious of what you're doing.
  • Try to incorporate short rhythm parts in your soloing, like in a funky strumming way, to achieve basic resting points.

You might have noticed that I don't overwhelm you with tabs and solo samples. Although I will do that more often in the upcoming articles, the reason I am holding back on that is because I would like you to look at soloing a bit different. Let's face it ... on many sites you find tabs of the famous solos or the obliged scales and patterns that you are told to learn.

Nothing wrong with that. It's just that in the end you want to have your own style and the capability to improvise and/or compose your own soloing. While there is so much going on during soloing it's, understandable, easy and comfortable to lean back on the scales that you practiced so hard on.

That, however, is why a lot of guitarists sound the same and almost seem to be scared of jumping out of the crowd. The key to avoid that is intuition in combination with the use of a lot of different (short) patterns that you can learn. In the first articles I already showed you some examples of those (more to come)

By combining patterns (in fact small parts of scales) with intuition, you are capable of improvising and playing on the spot. And yes, now and then it happens that you play something that wasn't supposed to, but on the whole your playing might be much more interesting to listen to.

You can start with that at home. While playing along with a drum computer/backing track you can make up licks in your head that you would like to play. Practice these licks and you've created something that belongs to you. Getting used to this approach means that after a while you will be able to play licks that you invent on the spot and perform them.

Another very effective way of spicing up your soloing is to repeat short patterns or bends, so they will be accentuated. It's an important part of the whole and is used by many famous guitar players.

So what I'm trying to say is, stay with your own creativity and let this surface instead of relying to much on existing solos and/or pre-fabricated scales. Intuition is a "rock like kind of approach" so it will suit the rock guitar player. Practicing technique to be able to perform well is always necessary of course, but the next time you download a backing track of a famous track, try to play your own solo and not just the original one.

A guitar player with a very own style and great technique is

- Blues Saraceno -