How to make guitar solos

Hey everyone! So today, I’m going to share with you all how to make guitar solos.

Before we get into it, let’s have our moment of silence. 

At this time, I would like all of us to take a moment of silence and pray to God to guide us more towards him each day. Ask God to help us to understand him all the more each day that passes. Take a minimum of 5 minutes and pray for this. 

Now back to the show

How to make guitar solos

So there are some key concepts that you should understand first when making a guitar solo. 

The first thing that you should understand is that you have to be within the key of the song in order to make a guitar solo.

Now I understand that you say to yourself that you’ve seen guitarists who make guitar solos with notes all over the fret board. 

And I agree I’ve seen the same thing.

In this article we will go over some of those techniques. 

But before that let’s highlight some other key concepts in the guitar solo.

First concept stay within the key

I know you’re eager to go out there and show off how technical of a player you are at the guitar, 

But most often than not, it’s not necessary to go chromatic on a song that’s trying to be a pop hit. 

Pop hits are often simple and easy going songs that don’t need a lot of crazy all over the place solos. 

So staying within key is a good concept to keep.

Second concept stay within rhythm 

You need to keep a good rhythm in your guitar solos. 

Guitar is a rhythm instrument, so keeping a diverse and dynamic sense of rhythm in a guitar solo is absolutely essential to making your guitar solos shine. 

If you really think about it, you only have around 8 or 9 notes within a given key that you can mess around with to make a solo. 

And with those little selection of notes within the solo, you need to make it sound very interesting without a wide variety of note selections.

This is where rhythm comes in. 

The selection of when and where to play the notes is just as important if not more important than the actual note selection itself. 

Because what happens is that you can actually make a good guitar solo with just 5 notes and it’s actually done all the time using the pentatonic scale. 

The only thing is that your rhythm needs to be on point to make it sound interesting. 

Third concept, keep the beat

This goes hand in hand with stay within rhythm. 

But it’s a little different. 

I remember when I first started my guitar solos, I had a good sense of rhythm and a good sense of note selections, but I just couldn’t keep beat. 

It’s a different dynamic making up a guitar solo and keeping beat to it. 

It’s a whole new challenge to it. 

I remember when I first started, when I was keeping beat, I was with very basic rhythm, almost always on the beat playing type. 

I couldn’t do 8th note or 16th note runs. 

I couldn’t do triplets and believe it or not, I had to re-teach myself how to hold notes for half notes and whole notes. 

It was a different challenge. 

Don’t get me wrong, I could do those things when the song was already written out, but when making the guitar solo was different. 

Pick the right gear

It’s no wonder that the electric guitar is the most sought after when making guitar solos. 

But acoustic guitars can be used for guitar solos as well.

It’s just that you should know your limits. 

Acoustic guitars can in theory play everything that an electric guitar can play, but most often than not, it’s not possible. 

The acoustic guitar has a thicker neck which makes it more diffficult to wrap your hands around the neck of the guitar.

Electric guitars are louder therefore it makes making hammer-ons and pull offs a lot easier. 

Tapping and certain shred guitar techniques are also almost exclusively done on electric guitars. 

Broadcast

I sure hope that I have been an inspiration and a hope to you all. Please remember to pray, read your bible, go to church, and love God above all else. Like, comment, share, subscribe, and I will see you all next time.

If you want to go to heaven, then believe in Jesus and you will go to heaven. (John 3:16)

Thank you all for listening in on this blog post. 

German Gonzalez, signing out!