Solo advice

danshakin

Hi, just joined and I had a quick scan but couldn't see this covered so here goes:
My 15yr old son is getting pretty good at playing, mostly in the rock style, he's struggling to develop his own solos though, can anybody recommended a book or online source to help him progress? Cheers Dan

professorben

It's a tricky one, it take a while to develop your own style, and it's not really something that can be 'taught' obviously a great place to start is learning the solos of your heroes, but I'd suggest some really good theory lessons, a good teacher will be able to link it to his favourite artists or styles, that will give him the knowledge to begin breaking out of any ruts he's currently in. On the subject of books: Guthrie Govan Creative Guitar vol1&2. They give A LOT of info, all of it gold, but it might scare the crap out of him, as there is a huge amount of info and it assumes you have no issue practicing 8+ hours a day.

ChrisCox1994

Go and jam with as many other musicians as possible, pick up little bits off them over a year or so and he'll develop a style.

Open mics are a great way of doing it.

benmurray85

steal from the best

TheOtherDennis

Justin Sandercoe is very highly rated as a teacher, he does a fair bit of stuff about soloing and improvising.

Roland

Here's a few tricks:

1. Play the song's melody. If you don't get it perfectly then even better because it will sound as though you are developing on a theme.

2. Learn other people's solos to pick up their techniques.

3. Noodle. By this I mean try out different sequences of notes just to see how they sound. 

4. Take something you know and play it differently: slides, slurs, bends, legato, different positions and fingerings. This is really useful for developing your own style, and have it shine through even when playing someone else's song.

Catthan

You can't play what you can't hear so one needs to inform their inner ear.

The way to do this is

1. trascribe

2. Use info available to compose motifs, licks, solos. 

3. Put this to practice: Play over backing tracks, jam with others, record etc

The more you do that, the easier it becomes and you can do this easily on the spot, or, even if not, with time you develop an inherent ability of how to build a solo (when to shred, when to employ dynamics, when to use silence etc) These are not necessirily connected to how and how well you apply the fundamental building blocks of a solo-melody (scales, licks, aprs etc)

The are varying degrees of what improv. is about and how much of the improv. we consider in, say, Jazz is actually improv.

The underlying concept is about using what info you got and arrange that creatively on the spot. 

With rock there is a bit more freedom in the sense that there is no improv. purity police. IOW, nowt wrong in composing your own solos for every cover or original you play and do slight variations every time you play a song.

It also helps if you keep it consistent for the listener night after night. 

With Jazz and blues OTOH,  the only thing that "needs" to remain consistent is the melody of, most often, a std. song. 

then you are kinda expected to improvise and exercise creativity the the max. of your potential. That's the ultimate goal.

With rock, imho you can get away with repetition (or consistency IOW) and imho, there's nowt wrong with that although you could also try to be fully creative every time. 

Barney

I used to just put records on and try and play along in key ...after a while you just get better at it ...i never really copied solos but rather tried to copy the players style and feel ...i just put records on and played solo all the way through...even the singing parts ...

The advantage of doin that rather than youtube backers is that you can hear how the guitarist out of the band does it and try and get that feel..

GuyBoden

Copy your fav solo from a recording by ear, from the beginning to the end. Learn to sing it first, then it will be stuck in your mind and then find the notes on the guitar phrase by phrase.

The dynamics of a solo are very important, the parts that are quiet, the parts that are louder, the parts with lots of fast notes, the parts with few notes, the parts with no notes.

Figure out what notes are used over each chord, so you can use these choices in your own solos later.

Most of all, enjoy playing along with your fav solo.......

Teetonetal

Yeah, as other said above, get him to transcribe solos by ear - just make sure it's simple enough to start with (easily by red hot chilli peppers is a good one)

Get a looper, so that he can lay down some backing with dynamics to solo over.

Record the solos and listen back - nothing liek a bit of self critique.

Get him to enter the solo of the month competition in the making music section of this very forum. There are some good players on this site who enter, so he can listen to what others do - learning from the good and bad bits, the different ideas, what's generic, whats interesting etc... 

...and then he can have other people critique his playing. That is important IMO.