Hey all, I am an average guitar player. I can play most things, I know more chords and voicings than most players but where I really lack is in the "style", Speed and soloing department. Anyone know of ways to improve in these areas. IE should I buy an SRV Tab book and noty stop till I can play it. Or are their some excerises I can practice with a metronome. If I had the cash I would get lessons, but you know how it is.

Anyway, any help, links, song recommendations ANYTHING! would be great.

Thanks

depends. do you want passive music fans to say 'oh wow he's a great guitar player he sounds just like guitar players X,Y, and Z' or do you want fellow musicians to say 'damn, that dude can play'

if you want the first then get all the tab books you can get your hands on. if you want the 2nd start listening to as much NON-guitar based music as you can dig. i'd cite eric dolphy and jaga jazzist with the same level of influence on my soloing style as jimi hendrix or kim thayil.

it seems pretty straight forward to me, if all you do is listen to other guitar players you're never going to do anything besides end up sounding like them. if you start stretching your ears out and getting into non-guitar based stuff but still find a way to incorporate you guitar into that music then you're going to start developing YOUR style.

It's boring to say it, but PRACTICE is the key.

The key to playing with speed is knowing exactly what you're going to play. In fact, as you develop, you'll often find that your fingers know the notes better than your brain does.

It doesn't matter what type of music it is you want to play: starting off slowly and gradually increasing the speed will enable you to play almost anything.

Work from a book if you enjoy it, but personally I've never found copying other people's solos to be that useful. Learning the (much-maligned) minor pentatonic is an essential part of any soloist's foundations, but remember there are plenty of other interesting scales to work with too. Arpeggios are also very handy. Don't try to learn them all at once, for that way madness lies. Try to do one small thing superbly and then move on to the next.

I'd echo what panbient said about listening to other instruments too. I saw a covers band the other week who were pretty good; they did Pink Floyd's 'Money', and the guitarist played the sax solo spot on - it was quite impressive considering it was just copied. He'd had to think about how to get his guitar to sound like a sax, and it worked.

It all comes down to practice, though. Don't feel you need to go at it for ten hours a day - little and often should work fine. Make sure you set yourself reasonable and specific goals when you practise - by the end of today I want to be able to do that.

Good luck!

i'll echo this one. there are a sad amount of idiots in my local area who've complained about having serious hand and wrist pains after deciding they were going to buckle down and become 'great' guitarists by going from 0 practice to 8-10 hours per day. not a single one of them lasted more than 3 days and they all sucked.

For soloing just use a scale you like and stick with it, also make up your own short little riffs that you could use in your solos. For speed I guess you could try playing scales faster and faster 'til you can get them right.


Also if you do it 8-10 hours you pretty much end up going in cycles whether you know it or not, and don't really learn any more than if you practiced one or two hours.

For songs I can suggest Zeppelin stuff, it does help you get faster, try the Dazed and Confused solo.


One of the things that can help you is having these thought processes in your head while you solo.

1) Visualize the notes that will sound good after the ones you play, and work on not going in circles
2) Think about what notes those will be

And don't practice improvising solos to do on the spot in a song

1) If you do it will probably end up making all your improvisations sound the same, trust me. With a good amount of work they won't sound the same.
2) If you make something really awesome it will really piss you off that you will never play it again.

Write out a solo, it may sound like a long and demanding task but it isn't.

you make it sound like playing guitar is about having a rolodex filled with 'cool licks' to be whipped out when the time is right as opposed to a way of playing music within a given tonal range.

Are you kidding? That's one way to produce some really boring solos...


Don't practise improvising? You're meant to be giving the guy advice, not helping him to stunt his progress!

I've actually started a program of scales playing with a metronome as well as some chromatic stuff. After a few days I already can see a difference. For soloing I bought a book called the play along series, where the have a backing track cd and picture of the fret board where every note within the scale is put in and you go from there, it pretty cool, opposed to learning someone elses solos, it forces you to be creative and make mistakes and figure what works within a song. But I've already incorporpated your suggestions.

Chord Tones are the key to a strong solo. If your solo wraps itself around the chord tones- particularly the third and the seventh (guide tones) that occur in the harmony- your solo stays consonant, tuneful, and (most importantly) emotionally relevant.

If you're playing straight eighths, the chord tones should occur on the beat for maximum effect (as in one and two and three... etc). This concept occurs in all types of music except Rock Music, really. You're as likely to hear it in Bartok as in Bop. Nonetheless, it can certainly find application in a rock context. Check out the free video lessons on this site: www.guitarforbeginners.com

This guy, Kirk Lorange, teaches method that revolves around that concept, but with a few tricks thrown in. Check his youtube videos, too (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDawEHIl1z8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C56N6...lated&search=). Results, man, results.

Modes are a good thing to learn (It's what I'm currently working on) and the modes tell you what notes to play over certain chords. it makes soloing easier and if you do it right it will almost always sound good.

Lots of memorizing, but worth it. Look them up