Guitar Playing Speed Tips To Improve Your Soloing

Want to play killer guitar solos with speed and technicality?

Don’t make this common mistake:

Training your speed heavily with tons of practice hours while neglecting phrasing or guitar skill integration.

Why?

This is what causes unbalanced playing where you have a lot of skill but don’t know how to use it while soloing – resulting in robotic or exercise-like solos.

You want to use your speed as a powerful tool to express yourself on guitar.

Here is how to practice guitar to learn how to do it and play killer guitar solos like never before:

 

1. Practice Improvising With Everything!

Learning how to improvise guitar phrases is critical for being able to play interesting and expressive guitar solos. Yet, many guitarists never practice this

Don’t end up sitting there clueless when the time comes to solo because you never practiced phrasing.

Work on your guitar phrasing to take full advantage of your speed and technical skills so your soloing sounds amazing (rather than just like a bunch of exercises thrown together).

What is a great way to begin improving your phrasing?

Simple.

Start by making just one note sound amazing.

This video shows you how to do it:

2. Make Your Solos Flow Effortlessly By Combining All Your Skills Together

One of the most common mistakes you can make on guitar is practicing different skills in isolation from your other skills (but never together).

Why is this a mistake?

Simple.

It makes it difficult to use your skills in a fluid manner while playing actual (non-exercise) music.

For example: playing guitar solos or any other kind of improvisational action.

Here’s how to practice combining different skills together so your guitar soloing sounds great:

Apply this same concept not just to scales and arpeggios, but every technique you have mastered.

 

3. Improve Your Soloing Fast By Making Your Guitar Practice Very Strategic

One thing many guitarists don’t know is that improving your creativity with guitar soloing phrases is a skill that can be practiced.

You just need to approach soloing by isolating different aspects of your playing to force yourself to be creative in others.

What does this mean?

Here are some examples. Practice this during the time you set aside for improvisation:

·         Improvise with only a few notes while using vibrato and bends to make them sound as expressive as possible

·         Use only continuous eighth note rhythms

·         Play with double stops only

·         Tremolo pick every note

·         Only use one finger to play notes (rotate between different fingers)

·         Don’t play notes on adjacent strings

Think of more creative restrictions to use while improvising to challenge yourself to be creative in many different situations .

4. Solo All Over The Fretboard At Will By Mastering Fretboard Memorization

The better you know where notes, scales and arpeggio patterns are on the fretboard, the easier it is to quickly and effortlessly move from one idea to the next.

This is how you make guitar soloing feel easy and natural just like when you see the pros performing.

So, what are some ways to improve your fretboard memorization?

Here’s a few:

1. Practice finding ways to combine scales and arpeggios together, like shown in the tab below.

The better you get at this, the more smoothly you are able to move from one area of the fretboard to the next. Plus, your scales and arpeggios begin sounding more musical rather than like mere exercises.

2. Learn modal patterns by starting with modes in close fretboard positions and expanding from there.

Modes basically means playing a scale by starting/ending on a note other than the root note of that scale. For example, starting your A minor scale on the B note. Practice integrating different modal patterns together to give yourself different ways to play using the same notes.

For example: Practice the first two mode patterns in the tab above by only playing the first two strings of each pattern at first. Move between them freely while improvising. Then, over time add more notes and expand to cover more of the fretboard.

3. Isolating starting points scale patterns or arpeggios on different strings. Don’t fall into the trap of always beginning a scale run on the lowest string, root note. Practicing starting on different notes of different strings to get rid of this common guitar soloing crutch and solo more freely.

Looking for even more tips to help you play better guitar solos?

You’ve got it!

Become a better lead guitarist using this free guitar soloing advice.