Solo help

Zoid23 · #1 January 28th, 2006

im not that experienced and im probably jumping ahead quite abit , but i have been watching a lot of music videos and have been focusing on trivium alot and have seen alot of their solos, and have been wondering if there is a way to teach yourself to solo like that or do you just have to have a natural talent to do that? please help if you can

allthumbs · #2 January 28th, 2006

I am not familiar with that band. There are basicly two ways to think about soloing. One is to use scales and pents and the other is to play through chords. Playing through chords leads to much more melodic phrasing than scales. Scales can easily trap you into linier thinking and you can end up running up and down scales. For shear brute speed in soloing scales are faster because you can burn them into muscle memory,again,the down side is playing the same scale runs time and time again. When playing over chords you know where you are at all times and can get back on track if you get lost. A friend of mine chose the wrong scale to play over a tune and the result was he played off key for the whole thing and couldn't find a way out of it. That would be impossible if you play through chords. Scale playing seems to be the most popular way of soloing for hard rock and metal. I think it comes from lifting excercises from piano. In piano,you practice scales to play music, somehow in guitar it has changed to scales are music. As you can tell I am biased towards chord based solos. I have tried both and found scales just don't do it for me.
The short answer is that the basics of soloing can be learned either chord or scale based. The tricky part is being melodic with what you are playing.

chuckswood2001 · #3 January 28th, 2006

hi zoid23

there are a lot o solo guitarist out there, u can learn to play just about anything ur heart desires, first learn the basics, then pick out the kind of music u want to play,do a google search for tabs by the band u want to learn to play and see what u come up with

chuck

Zoid23 · #4 January 28th, 2006

Zoid23 · #5 January 28th, 2006

thanks ( 2both of u) could either of you suggest a scale for me to learn just so i can get into playing scales??

allthumbs · #6 January 28th, 2006

google pentatonic scales. They seem to be the most used.

nagukush · #7 January 28th, 2006

Thanks friends, seems i'll start to a learn a scale too. Can you please suggest that after learning a scale well, what should be the approach towards it. I mean , should i randomly try a lick or 2 , or browse for tabs using those scales???

Sorry if my question is irrelevent, but i've really wanted to know this for some time now.

allthumbs · #8 January 28th, 2006

Can't help you there. I don't think in scales at all. I solo using chords as my structure.
In another post,Kush, you said you wanted to play like Kirk. He, like me and Sid doesn't think scales when he plays. You won't find any scale running in the lessons here so if you want to play like Kirk focus on chords. That footprints improv of Sids' you just heard was played without any reference to scales, he was thinking chords.