How To Train For Guitar Speed That Makes Your Solos Sound Amazing (Without Sacrificing Melody)
One of the biggest problems fast guitarists face is not being able to play guitar solos with excellent technique AND a strong melody that creates a powerful emotional reaction. This happens when you only practice for speed while never practicing to integrate your technical skills into a musical context.
Good news: it doesn’t take long to learn how to use your speed to play killer, memorable solos that inspire people.
After you learn the basics, the quality of your lead guitar playing goes way up and you finally have the power to use speed to control the tension and release of your solos.
Here are 4 quick tips for how to train yourself to use guitar speed in emotionally expressive and interesting ways while soloing:
Tip#1: Don’t Get In A Hurry – Use Guitar
Speed As Just One Of Many Tools In Your Soloing Arsenal
Playing guitar with speed sometimes involves feeling like you need to showcase your skills. There’s nothing wrong with this, but some guitarists take this to the extreme by constantly trying to play fast while soloing. This results in solos that sound more like technical exercises than actual music.
Instead of trying to cram all your technical skills into every solo, train yourself to use guitar speed to compliment great phrasing.
Here is one effective practice approach for doing this:
Take 10 minutes or so to create a few short guitar licks that sound cool. Focus on making them expressive and interesting rather than trying to play them really fast.
Go slowly while thinking of cool licks and try to squeeze as much expressive emotion out of every note, like in this video:Improvise with these ideas for a few minutes using vibrato and bends to get all the expression you can out of them.
Then practice improvising for a few minutes as you normally would.
Alternate between these two approaches several times.
This helps you transition into more creative, expressive and thoughtful guitar soloing. This way you train yourself to use guitar speed as just a single tool in your soloing arsenal… rather than the only option.
Result: Your guitar solos sound WAY better in just a matter of several practice sessions.
Tip#2: Focus On Integration – Use Your Guitar
Speed To Emphasize Your Phrases Instead Of Using It Like A Flashy Gimmick
Awesome guitar solos may include some fast licks that sound great… but they are usually combined with slower phrases that give the listener time to process a memorable melody. This creates an ebb and flow of tension and release.
The better you get at controlling tension and release in your solos, the more of an emotional impact there is when you play with speed.
You begin integrating this idea into your soloing by identifying slow/held-out notes in your guitar solos as markers that divide up the solo as a whole. In between these markers, speed can be used to build tension.
This concept becomes easy to apply in your guitar solos when you hear it explained in this video:Here is a quick idea for creating your own guitar solos to practice with using this concept:
1.
Create two guitar phrases that you can play back
to back.
2.
Make sure each phrase has a beginning and ending
note that is played slow as a means to relax tension.
3. Improvise with each phrases to think of 5-10 ways to connect the slow notes together using faster notes.
Practicing this doesn’t take too much time. After you do this 3-5 times a week, it becomes natural and your guitar solos sound intense and expressive whenever you use speed.
Tip#3: Keep It Simple – Playing Guitar Solos With Speed Doesn’t Always Mean
Using A Lot Of Notes Or Techniques
It’s not necessary to burn up and down 3 octave scale patterns or use complex string skipping patterns when you want to play guitar with speed. Playing guitar with speed can be as simple as adding tremolo picking to a few notes between held-out notes.
This is as easy as tremolo picking notes you would normally pick only once. Using this approach just once or twice per solo sounds really cool without becoming too repetitive.
This video shows you how to increase your tremolo picking speed:
Tip#4: Make It Memorable – Focus On Musical Expression First
One of your biggest goals while playing guitar solos is to create something that sticks in people’s minds after they listened to it. This means finding ways to play expressive and memorable phrases. Practicing this skill is both fun and extremely beneficial for your guitar playing as a whole.
One surprisingly easy way to become better and more expressive during your guitar solos is to play any lick over and over while trying to vary it a little every repetition.
This keeps you from falling into the common trap of “running out of ideas” too quickly. It also trains you to play guitar with speed (if you play anything fast) while retaining a sense of melody.
This video demonstrates how to apply this concept to play better guitar solos right away: