guitarspeed.net

Fact: There are tons of guitar players who can play with speed. However, there are MUCH fewer players who know how to use their guitar speed expressively to play inspiring solos.

Learning how to do this makes you stand out from the crowd, giving you better control over the instrument and making your friends envious of your skills.

This guitar speed lesson provides you with tips to make your fast soloing sound musically expressive. Practice each piece of advice on its own for just a few minutes each day (as part of an efficient guitar practice schedule) and watch your soloing skills go through the roof in no time!

Tip #1: Raise The Quality Of Your Guitar Solos By Making Each Note Count

It’s easy to fall into the trap of burning through a guitar solo with tons of speed every chance you get. This often comes from a desire to show off one’s skills or take advantage of them because you’ve spent so much time improving technique.

Problem is, great guitar solos aren’t just about speed. They often require great phrasing to make them emotionally engaging for anyone listening.

Get into the habit of making every note you play sound as amazing as possible.

Here’s how to practice this:

Take just a few minutes each day to play one note as amazing as possible. Use different rhythms, tremolo picking, vibrato, slides (to the note from another note), bending and any combination of the above to make the note as expressive as you can.

Add up to two more notes and repeat. See how much expression you can get from just these few notes. Then improvise freely for a few minutes with this concept in mind.

Tip #2: Give Yourself More Time To Think While Soloing Using Repetition

One of the secrets to improvising awesome guitar solos every time you play is giving yourself time to think. It’s very difficult to play creative ideas on guitar if you only give yourself a split second to think about what you will play next before you play it.

Giving yourself more time to think while soloing takes practice, but quickly pays off… taking your guitar soloing creativity to the next level.

This doesn’t require slowing down your guitar speed either.

Here are some quick ideas to give you more time to think while playing solos:

·         Focus on playing one or two notes slowly and melodically while using fast runs to fill the space between them

·         Repeat the same note(s) using different note rhythms using tremolo picking with brief moments of rest between each tremolo picked series of notes

·         Actively work on thinking ahead to what you want to play several notes before you play it

Tip #3: Develop Better Solo Phrasing By Playing Creatively With Rhythm

Your guitar soloing ideas become more interesting when you learn to use variety in the rhythm of your phrases. Training yourself to think creatively with rhythm is fun and easy. Before you know it, you’ll solo with much more interesting phrases than before.

Try this creative rhythm practice ideas out:

Practice for several minutes by soloing using only ONE note. Use different rhythms and guitar techniques to add as much variety to the note as possible. Then apply this in the middle of a guitar solo by repeating a note several times to give yourself time to think ahead.

By thinking more rhythmically, you become better over time at thinking of creative musical phrases. You are also able to maintain speed and intensity while doing this by using tremolo picking on the repeated notes.

Tip #4: Make Your Guitar Solos More Unique By Playing The Same Notes With Unique Timbre

There are tons of ways to make the same pitch sound different. This is the musical concept of “timbre”. Timbre describes the difference between (for example) a guitar and a piano when we hear each instrument playing the same pitch.

This concept applies within a single instrument too and knowing how to use it helps you play more creatively.

Here is a cool way to utilize timbre even while playing with distortion:

While playing a guitar solo, use palm muting over some of the notes followed by notes played openly without muting. This makes the palmed muted notes seem “quieter”, making your playing sound more varied and unique.

Apply this over the previous concepts in this article by using palm muting (and tremolo picking) on repeated notes.

Tip #5: Make Fast Guitar Solos More Emotionally Expressive With Legato

Legato technique gives you tons of creative options for playing guitar solos with speed that sounds smooth and masterful. It only takes a few minutes of practice per day to become creative with legato and the results are BIG for your soloing creativity.

Use this exercise to creatively use legato to inject speed and expression into a guitar solo lick:

1.   Choose no more than 3 notes from any guitar scale or lick.

2.   Repeat these notes over and over using legato techniques to create as many variations as you can think of. For example: Play the notes using various combinations of slides, bends, vibrato, hammer-ons or pull-offs. Play them as fast as you want.

This simple exercise both improves your legato, helps you keep both hands in better sync and develops your guitar solo phrasing. Focusing on just a few notes at a time ensures that you focus on playing quality notes and phrases while soloing.