subject: Which is the best guitar course to learn solos? [print this page] Which is the best guitar course to learn solos?
You will find ads of various guitar courses to learn solos and licks all over the internet. But it is very hard to find out which one is the best for you, which suits your requirements etc. You will also find many reviews on the internet praising the courses from top to bottom, but most of the reviews are copies of the other saying the same things over and over. And I am sure most of them wouldn't have even seen the real course or tried them out on their own.
So, in order to give you an authentic and first hand information about the course I am going to share some knowledge that I gained from a DVD based video guitar course that I joined lately, so that you will have a better idea about what to expect from it. Let me ask you something. Why do you want to learn guitar in the first place? Obviously to play some popular songs, solos or riffs on it, right? Fortunately this one is designed in a more practical and modern way unlike other courses, so that you will get a strong basic foundation on guitar as well as learn all the essential techniques required to play heavy metal, rock n' roll or blues.
If you are in interested in Rock n' roll or heavy metal, you might have heard about the word shredding. I am going to elaborate few playing techniques used in shredding. Shredding is associated mainly with heavy metal, rock and blues guitar playing and is nothing but playing fast leads or solos on your electric guitar by applying certain right hand techniques like different types of picking, like
Alternate picking
Economy picking
Sweep picking and so on
And various left hand legato techniques like
Pull offs
Hammer ons
Tapping
Shredding requires a lot of practice and creativity and also involves a great amount of whammy bar usage or tremolo arm as it is commonly known. Other techniques used while shredding are
Multi finger tapping
Trills( either using hammer ons or pull offs or by using whammy bar)
A shredder should also be well versed with sweep picked arpeggios, arpeggios, palm muting and power chords. In fact an expert shredder is a person who invents a new technique on his own and adds that to the list of shredding techniques.
Now I will explain some of the techniques in detail. Let's take the first one
Alternate Picking This is a playing technique where the player uses the pick or plectrum to play the strings in alternate up and down fashion. This picking style is the best for playing speedy riffs and leads, and the play usually adds other shredding techniques like legato, hammer ons and pull offs to bring about melody and beauty to the solo.
Legato Legato is an Italian word meaning a smooth transitioning from one note to the other without any intermediate silence. Lets take legato style Hammer ons, this is a guitar playing technique where in you pluck an open string once and use one of your fretting fingers to gently tap any of the fret to create the sound of that fret without plucking. So the second note is created without plucking. Pull off is exactly opposite to hammer on.
