If you’re here because you want to take your guitar solos to the next level, I am about to break your world because “What scales should I learn to be better at guitar solos?” is the wrong type of question. While scales are important, the true key to better soloing lies somewhere else entirely. In today’s article you’ll learn why that is, and how to reset your assumptions (and your playing) as IMHO scales are not the solution to better guitar solos.
Volume doesn’t necessarily dictate importance
If you assessed the importance of a guitar topic based on the amount of resources available for it, then learning scales would likely come at the top. A quick Google of “Learning scales on guitar” returns about 17 Million results! The amount of TAB, videos, exercises, books, and courses dedicated to learning guitar scales is HUGE. And this alone would suggest its significance in improving soloing – but it’s not.
Why learning scales to improve soloing is a scam
Don’t get me wrong, scales have their place in learning guitar. Their purpose is to present your ear with a sound, your fingers with strength and dexterity and your brain with an understanding of key. And scales play several other very important roles but their role in specifically improving your soloing is massively overstated.
To paraphrase bass player Victor Wooten, the emphasis on learning scales for better soloing is simply designed to sell more stuff: videos, courses, books etc. It doesn’t actually help you with one very important part: creating the solo.
Ask yourself this: “Do I really believe that after learning more scales in all their patterns and positions, a great guitar solo is just going to fall out from under my fingers?”
Truthfully, you know the answer. You’ve almost definitely tried learning at least one scale – probably the minor pentatonic – only to find that the creativity and musicality needed to create a beautiful and melodic solo is not embedded in learning the scale itself.
Learning scales to improve your lead guitar is no more effective than reciting the alphabet in an attempt to improve your vocabulary.
“Do I really believe that after learning more scales a great guitar solo is just going to fall out from under my fingers?”
By now, you know that scales ≠ solos
A great lead guitar solo:
is a response to a musical landscape
requires a narrative
involves timing, phrasing and expression
Learning scales doesn’t help you develop any of these.
Did you ever examine why you think scales are the pathway to improving your guitar solos?
When I asked myself this question, the answer was no. I had never dug into the root of this belief. But when I asked myself why I thought scales were the method to create great solos, the answer for me (and probably for you) was “because everyone said so!” And the sheer volume of previously mentioned resources seemed to further validate this way of thinking.
I never questioned this and you probably haven’t either. I never asked how learning scales would help me make that leap into playing awesome solos. I just assumed that advice from people playing longer than me was good advice. It wasn’t.
Those who took the scales pathway got stuck at a dead end
Almost all my students come to me with this issue. I teach mainly 30-55 year old men who have been playing more years than they care to admit but still haven’t managed to unlock the way to create melodic solos. They describe:
Not knowing what to play over certain chord progressions
Being stuck using pentatonic boxes and finding it hard to sound interesting with the same 5 notes
Being “unsure” of how and when to use notes outside these box shapes
Their solos sounding robotic and scalar when they play
Frustration as they see other guitar players soloing in a more sophisticated way
Feeling like they are at a dead end and stuck for ideas to move forward
If this sounds like you then you are not alone. In my experience this affects every self-taught player, and is the biggest hurdle you have faced since the F barre chord.
What should I focus on to improve my guitar solos?
The steps I recommend can generally be described as:
Unlearn
Understand
Create
Develop
Or “Double-U, C,D” as I like to call it.
“Empty your cup so it may be filled.”
Unlearn the thinking and techniques holding you back
Like driving through a narrow country lane and meeting an oncoming vehicle. The only thing to do is reverse the whole way back up the track.
Unlearning starts with ceasing activities that reinforce your current scalar approach. Embark on a Scales Detox and ban yourself from playing or practicing scales, even as a warmup (but singing them is okay – recommended in fact – see Ear Training below).
Additionally, avoid the classic “noodling over a backing track”, as it is particularly damaging to your progress. Instead replace this with chromatic exercises and ear training.
You’ll find this is the most challenging step as you have to unthink and undo many years of scale drill conditioning and muscle memory.
Understand the musical landscape for your solo
Earlier I talked about a guitar solo being a response to a musical landscape. The secret to levelling up your lead playing is actually very simple: know and understand this musical landscape and the note choices available to you.
Right now you might be panicking because of the amount of work you feel that might be, but I am here to reassure you: it’s so straightforward a 9 year old can do it, and you’ll kick yourself for not getting it sooner.
Play the game of matching
Did you ever play Snap, the card game? It’s a simple game of matching. If you lay down the eight of clubs on top of the eight of diamonds, the first one to shout “Snap!” wins those cards, because they match. Understanding your musical landscape is as simple as this.
Why?
Because your musical landscape (chord progression) is provided to you. And your task (primarily) is to match the notes you play in your solo with the notes contained within the chord playing at that moment in the progression.
It’s. That. Simple.
No more questions like “What scale can I play over all these chords?”, cos that’s scalar thinking and you’re done with that. The question truly is: “What notes do the chords provide me with to build a solo from?”
But what about note names? I don’t know mine that well
A common response I encounter is “Well, I can’t do this until I know the note names on all strings.” False. Even without knowing note names you can build great solos simply by harnessing your knowledge chord shapes.
Understand the emotional value of intervals to build your solo
Understanding the emotional value of intervals, their relationship to the chord and the simplest way to categorise gives you the means to start to creating better solos.
Example:
A minor chord contains 3 intervals (1, b3, 5) but the one that gives a minor chord its minor colour is the flat 3 (b3). So starting your solo on the flat 3 will emphasise the “minor-ness”.
Additionally, intervals can be generally categorised as “resolved” or “unresolved”. The former being a kind of musical full stop while the latter is more like a comma. So ending your phrase on a unresolved interval suggests to the listener that there is more to come.
Embrace the two buckets method
Once you have levelled up your chord shapes knowledge and understand the intervals within them, you can simplify solos by embracing this thought: there’s only two buckets.
Notes contained in the chord playing at this moment
All the others
Continuously create solos to understand what works (and what doesn’t) and why
Practical application is where you’ll really turn learned information into knowledge. Knowing how, why and when you can apply things you’ve learnt is essential for a deeper understanding and recognition of the correct context.
At first it’s best to pre-plan and map out your solos rather than to improvise. Cut yourself some slack and focus on one thing at a time. Recording them is useful for you to analyse your progress and to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Remember: nobody has to hear these solos. They (and you) are a work in progress and are a means to an end. Incorporate solo creation work in your daily practice and you’ll fins yourself making more musical choices.
Develop and iterate phrases from a master phrase
If you listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Texas Flood solo, you should notice that it doesn’t move around the fretboard that much. In fact the solo can be thought of as a series of “chapters” or paragraphs, where SRV stays in one place for a while and develops phrases from a similar phrase he played previously.
Instead of randomly moving all over the fretboard, think of your licks as a series of sentences that build into a paragraph. These sentences are all related and expand upon and enrich the first phrase.
One you’re done with the first paragraph, move on to a new area of the fretboard and continue the
How long will it take before I see results?
As a guitar teacher who has spend the last 20 years helping those stuck at the dead end, I’ve found it takes 7 key steps for students to achieve real results in improving their soloing. Working with students from my 10x Your Improv course, the timeline for confident success varies from 7-12 months.
“Holy Crap!” I hear you say, “I don’t want to be waiting that long.”
Well, to hit you with a truth bomb: it’s taken years for you to get into this mess, so its going to take around year to dig yourself out.