subject: Learn Guitar Solo - Learn the Guitar Solo from ANY Song! [print this page] Learn Guitar Solo - Learn the Guitar Solo from ANY Song!
The Secret of how toLearn the Guitar Solo from ANY Song!
Most aspiring guitar enthusiasts when they learn to play guitar at some point they desire to take the step up and want to learn to play guitar solos. After all being therhythm guitarist for a band is not so exciting. It is the lead guitar player screaming out a crazy and hot guitar solo is the one that gets the crowd screaming and the girls hot.
I can tell you from playing guitar for 30 years now, as a guitarist, there is nothing as satisfying as being the one screaming out a crazy guitar solo. I have had periods in my life over the past 10 years of playing where I devoted 6-8 hours per day studying lead guitar and spending countless hours going up and down the scale to perfect my technical ability as a lead guitar player.
With all my experience I can tell you that THE single best way to improve your lead guitar playing and style is to learn the guitar solo from other guitarists. When you learn the guitar solo from another guitarist is improves you as a lead guitar player in SO MANY WAYS!
Your technical ability as a lead guitar playing improves
You learn new guitar phrases that you can apply to all your future guitar solos. A lead guitar phrase is basically a short 1 or 2 second pattern of playing that produces a distinct sound. It is when you hear your favorite guitarist doing a lead guitar solo in a song and you hear a part of that solo and say to yourself "whoa! that sounded so cool. How did he do that??"
After learning a few guitar solos from the same guitarist you end up inheriting his style of playing guitar into your own style so learning another guitarists lead guitar solos you end up taking a piece of that guitarist with you forever. There is no other way toacquirethatother than studying and learning another lead guitarist solos.
The BEST way to learn the guitar solo from any song...
Here is the best way to learn the guitar solo from another guitarist AND gain the added benefits mentioned above:
Select a guitar solo that will inspire you. You want a guitar solo that when you listen to it you think to yourself "god I would LOOOOVVEEEE to be able to play that solo!" This step is super important because that passion will help you learn that solo so much faster and so much easier. You have no idea the power passion has. It is super important that you have that burning desire with the guitar solo your want to learn. If you don't feel it then pick another solo
Make sure the lead guitar solo you select in step #1 above is a challenge but not TOO big a challenge. You want to stretch but you don't want to do something that you think is impossible. If you could measure what you feel your talent as a guitarist is on a scale of one to ten pick a guitar solo that is just one step above your current talent level.
Select a piece of software that will slow down that guitar solo for you. Ideally you also want that software to have a built in equalizer so you can muff out the elements of the song that tend to drown out the guitar solo. Elements such as the bass, drums, cymbals all should be toned down as this will act to make the lead guitar part more pronounced and easier to hear so you can learn it. The software that I personally use for this is calledRiffMaster Pro.
Riffmaster also has a lot of other features which really helps to learn the guitar solo from any song including:
The ability to select a start and end point in the song that you have loaded into RiffMaster. That way you can set the start point to be the very beginning of the guitar solo and the end point the very end of the guitar solo and then have the program play only between those two points
RiffMaster lets you slow down the guitar as little or as much as you wish. You can slow a guitar solo down to a molasses crawl if you want.
Slows the music down WITHOUT changing the pitch or the tuning of the song. Without this feature learning the guitar solo will be a real pain as you will have to re tune your guitar with the music. If you have a locking tremlo system on your guitar like a Floyd Rose then this becomes a total nightmare.
The ability to change the pitch of the song if you wish. This comes in handy because if a song is out of tune with your guitar instead of having to re tune your guitar you can just move a slider bar in the RiffMaster program and re tune the song to match your guitars tuning. Again this can be a big time saver.
My final piece of advice for improving as a lead guitar player is once you have learned the guitar solo from your chosen song go past just learning it...MASTER IT. What I mean by that is become so familiar and so comfortable with that guitar solo that you interject your own personality and passion into the guitar solo so you truly make that guitar solo your own.
Once your have learned the guitar solo THAT WELL then you will notice a DRAMATIC improvement in your playing just from learning that one single guitar solo!
What about Guitar Tabs to learn the guitar solo?
My personal opinion is that I do not like guitar tabs. The ONLY time I recommend guitar tabs is if a part of a guitar solo is just impossible to learn by listening to it no matter how much you slow it down with RiffMaster. Then and only then use guitar tabs for that little piece of the guitar solo.
The reason I do not like guitar tabs is guitar tabs are NOT 100% accurate and they take the soul out of the guitar solo. I have learned guitar solos using both methods, guitar tabs and listening to the solo by ear and listening to the guitar solo and learning it by ear is just much better. If you use RiffMaster there is absolutely no reason you can not learn just about any guitar solo by ear.
