Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome to my course on how
to create a guitar solo. I'm excited, you've
decided to check it out. My name's Dave, and
I've been working as a professional touring guitarist and guitar instructor
here in Toronto, Canada for almost 15 years. Now, in this course, we'll use the analogy
of language to explore some fundamental components
of a well-made guitar solo. That'll get you
thinking about it in a way that puts the music first. This is not a music
theory course. And while I always encourage my students to
study music theory, you don't need a
background and theory in order to be successful
in this course. All you need is a guitar
and an open mind. If you ever feel the need to
reach out to me directly, feel free to send an email to
Dave, Dave Kirby music.com. Or you can visit my website,
dave kirby music.com. Now let's get started
with the first lesson.
2. The Class Project: For the class project
for this course, you'll be writing a
short guitar solo over the backing track provided
in the resources section. Throughout the
course, I'll be using this backing track to demonstrate
different techniques. So if you've never
done this thing before and you're feeling
nervous, Don't worry. By the end of the course, you'll have an idea
where to start. Then upload a video of yourself playing your solo
to the projects page. We can all see what
you've come up with. If you're not sure
what kind of length might be appropriate
for your guitar solo. Check out the last lesson in this course titled
Putting it all together. In that video, I
provide three examples that can give you an idea of
how long your solo could be. Have fun with it. I'm really excited to see
what you come up with.
3. Getting To The Point: So this lesson is all about
determining the purpose or the point or the role of the guitar solo that
you're trying to create. And from this, once
we have that decided, we can figure out the dynamic
shape that we're going for. And then once we know the dynamic shape that
we're going forward, we're going to have
a clearer idea of what are the tools at our disposal to help to carve
out that dynamic shape. As an analogy, let me tell you something that
music theater director once said to me about the role
of a song in a, in a play. He said to me that a
song can sometimes move the plot along in a way
that dialogue just can't. So he said, e.g. you can have two
characters that just need each other at the
beginning of a song, by the end of this
two-minute song, they're totally in
love with each other and they're willing to
die for each other. That's something that
dialogue can't do. Similarly in a, in a, in a song, a guitar solo can
manipulate the momentum of a song in a way that
sometimes a bridge can't, or another lyrical part might not be able to
do in the same way. So what I'm talking
about here often gets boiled down to
this phrase that I hear all the time uttered by really great musicians and really great guitar players. And they always say,
serve the song. And that's what we're talking
about in this lesson. Let me explain what
the purpose of a couple of different types
of guitar solos might be. One popular role of a guitar solo and purpose
of the guitar solo is to maintain dynamic momentum
between series of choruses. A really good example of
this is a song called wake me up by an
artist called table. So that's about the
TV BY what we've got in this song is
we have two choruses. And then you've got a
guitar solo, pretty short. And then after that you've
got to maybe more courses. Without that guitar solo there. You've just got a whole
bunch of choruses and it might get
kind of tedious. So by breaking it up with
a quick guitar solo, you're sort of maintaining, applied, maintaining momentum. And then when the chorus has come in again
after the solo, the listener is kinda
ready to hear them. So the dynamic shape for that solo is sort
of like short and sweet, and high-energy
throughout. Another common purpose of a guitar solo is to
build up momentum. And a really classic
example of this is slashes guitar solo
in sweet child of mine, The Guns and Roses song. I think we're all familiar
with that one part where he taps on the wah pedal
and he hits that really shredding
line, ascending line. And the solo kinda builds up. So the shape of the solo, it was kinda ramping up
the whole way through. That's kind of the
dynamic shape. So he starts a
little bit, I mean, a little bit more mellow and as he progresses
through the solo, he gets more and more high up the neck and more
and more fast-paced. Hits the Wah Pedal, adding another dynamic to
that whole thing. Another common purpose
for a guitar solo is the, I don't struggle with
how to describe this. It's sort of like a meandering, kind of like a relaxed vibe
throughout the whole thing. So sort of like a down dynamic, like throughout lots of
space, that kind of thing. The shape is sort of like flat, a little bit low, right? Examples of this
as like if anyone has ever listened to
The Grateful Dead, there's loads of great Jerry
Garcia solos that do that. They're just meandering. He's not really getting more exciting or
anything like that. It's kinda just
staying down here. Another really good example
is gravity by John Mayer. He's doing that blues guy is almost BB King sort
of thing where he's leaving a lot of space
in between phrases. But he's also not really like building up too high at
the end or anything, sort of keeping it
low and relaxed. Also dreams by Fleetwood Mac. I don't even know if I
would necessarily think of that as like a big guitar solo. But there is a guitar solo
there and it's very low and mellow and kind of heads into, I think, the third verse of
the last verse or something. So it's a way of sort of
generating interests, but keeping the dynamic low. The other common point
of a guitar solo is to copy the lyrics of
a verse or a chorus. So it really classic example is smells like Team
Spirit by Nirvana. He's, he's copying the
verse melody on the guitar. So without writing another
verse or anything like that, he's sort of like it's kinda, he's kind of playing
averse but on a guitar. So it adds like a
different kind of texture without inputting any more lyrical information
or anything like that. I want to make a note that
improvised solos can also take any one of these dynamic
shapes that I've mentioned. It's kinda less common to see an improvised
solo in the role of the maintaining momentum dynamic between a series
of courses on either side. In my experience, most of the artists that
I've played for when they have a solo
in-between a series of courses that's intended
to maintain momentum. They usually want
you to play that verbatim like the exact same way that it is on the record. It's more common as
an improviser to plan for solo dynamic shape. That's going to ramp up, especially if
you're dealing with an extended or open solo length. If you have an open extended
solo length and you come out swinging really
hard with like fast-paced playing
or really up high, kind of like eye popping stuff. It can be really hard to maintain that level
of energy through a long period of
time and you run the risk of running out of gas. You know, I find you
can always ramp up. It's pretty hard to sell
a ramp down in a solo. It almost always
in my experience, sounds like you're
running out of gas. Once you've determined the
purpose of your guitar solo, you can start to plan
for the dynamic shape. And once you've got
an idea of what the dynamic shape is
that you're going for. You can have a better idea
of what are the tools at your disposal to help you execute that intended
dynamic shape? In the following few lessons, I'm going to outline a couple of those tools that you can use and illustrate how you can implement them into your solos.
4. Vocabulary: In this lesson, we're gonna
be talking about vocabulary. If you consider the
analogy of language, it's possible to
express yourself with a very limited vocabulary. But if you want to express more complex ideas and
express yourself more freely, it helps to have a
larger vocabulary. When we're talking
about guitar solos, vocabulary means note choices. And no choices kinda means
scales and music theory. And this is not a course that's going to teach
you music theory. So we're not going
to be focusing on learning scales or learning
any music theory here. But I definitely recommend
if you're interested in improving your ability
to play guitar solos, that you'd look into learning music theory and
learning some scales. Today we're gonna be creating a guitar solo over a
backing track that I made. This backing track is
in the key of C minor. While it's not necessary
to know the key of something before you try and create a guitar solo over it, it definitely helps to
know that information. Okay, Here's a quick look
at the backing track. Now, if you already know
about music theory, chances are you might already
have some vocabulary that you can use to play over
something in the key of C minor. And if you do,
then that's great. But if you don't, then working give you some kind
of structure that you can rely on so that you've got some kind of vocabulary
that you use. So what I'm gonna do in a minute is I'm going to talk
about how to play the C minor pentatonic scale over top of this backing track. I know this isn't
a theory course and we're not going
to focus on theory, but we need to start somewhere. You can definitely write guitar solos without knowing
anything about music theory. You can sort of fish
around on the guitar and find some notes
that sound great. And that's definitely
something that's worth doing. But it's a little bit harder to improvise guitar solos this way. Alright, so you're about
to hear the track fade in. And once it comes in, I'm going to show
you how to play a C minor pentatonic scale. Now, all the notes
in this scale are fair game as a part
of your vocabulary. Notes that will sound good
when we're creating a solid. Okay, Now, here it is,
slowed down a little bit. There it is. So those
nodes will provide a great starting
point for you to start creating your
guitar solos with. Just like with language, an important part of anyone's musical
vocabulary is quotations. Quotations can be fragments
of guitar solos that you're referencing that you've heard in the past and that you
learn to play yourself. Or they can be
longer ideas taken from melodies are solos
that you've heard before. Okay, So here comes
the track again. But this time once it fades in, rather than playing the minor pentatonic
scale up and down, I'm going to play some
quotes, some idiomatic, really common short ideas that use the notes of the
minor pentatonic scale. Broadly speaking, there
are two classes of notes. Notes that sound good. Notes that sound bad. But I prefer to use
the term consonant instead of good and
dissonant instead of bad. This is because a
note that sounds dissonant is not
necessarily bad. It definitely has uses. E.g. a. Note that sounds
dissonant in one spot might sound great if you
put it somewhere else. Also, note that sounds
dissonant might be used to draw someone's
attention. Okay. Now this time when
the truck comes in, I'm going to start off by going up the minor pentatonic scale. But I'm going to
deliberately choose moments to leave the scale because I want you to hear
what it sounds like when I play some notes
that are not inside. So there's the first one. There's one there. That time when I left the
CLT didn't sound bad at all. Now let's see what happens
if I intentionally tried to use notes outside of the scale. It's really no logic
behind the notes that I'm choosing that are
outside of the scale. I'm just trying to show
that just because they're now that we've got an idea
of what kind of notes we can use to help
us create our solo. Let's take a look at some
ways that we can make these notes sound a little bit more musical and expressive.
5. Inflection: Now that we've given
some thought to the role and the overall dynamic
shape of our solo. Now that we've got
some vocabulary that we can draw from
under our fingers. It's time to start
thinking about inflection. And just like with language, in flexion can affect the sentiment behind
our vocabulary. An easy example of
this is a phrase like, my mother-in-law is coming to
stay with us this weekend. Depending on my inflection
and how I say those words, It's possible for me to
convey different means. E.g. if I said my mother-in-law is coming to
stay with us this weekend. You might think, okay, their relationship
is pretty great. He's excited about this weekend. Or I could say, Oh, my mother-in-law is coming to
stay with us this weekend. And it might mean
something on a guitar. There are a couple of
different ways that we can control our inflection. One of the most obvious
ways is through our tone. If you're using an
electric guitar, most electric guitars have
a series of controls that will help you to manipulate your tone right on the
face of the guitar. Depending on the
particular model of guitar that you're using, these controls might vary, but often, there is a pickup selector on this guitar that I'm
using right now. In this position, I'm
using my neck pickup. The neck pickup has a warmer
and more rounded off tone. In this position. Both my neck and my bridge
pickup are selected. In this position, my
bridge pickup is selected. Notice how each position
has a different tone. Also on the face of my guitar, I've got a volume control, and I've got a tone control. Manipulating the volume and tone control and
pickup selector in different combinations
allows me to control my inflection
in predictable ways. Also where I place my pic can have a big
impact on my tone. If I pick near the
bridge of the guitar, note sounds, I pick near
the neck of the guitar. My notes get a little
bit warmer and soft. Also, alternate
picking, which is alternating between
downward, upward motion, has a different vibe than say, picking continuous down,
or finger picking. Or a combination. Using different effects
can also have a big impact on your modulation effects. And reverb can give a different feel. Overdrive plays a big
role in any guitar part, and it's very subjective
depending on the guitarist. It's a really good idea
to sit down and spend some time getting
an overdrive tone that you're happy with. Another interesting
component of overdrive is its relationship to the volume
control on your guitar. By manipulating
the volume control on your guitar, you can often, if it's a well-made overdrive, affect the level of gain that gets heard at the
end of the signal chain. This makes the use of your volume control
in conjunction with an overdrive and tone a pretty effective
tool for inflection. Another tool that you can use
for inflection is vibrato. Vibrato is done
by gently rocking your wrist and to provide an oscillation
of pitch on a given day. Sliding into and out of different notes can
also be a helpful tool for string bands are another important
part of inflection. You can bend this string
on your guitar by imagining that you're turning a door knob or a door handle. So the movement kinda comes from the arm and
not the fingers. It's not this sort
of movement here. Often I'll bend strings with
my ring finger and support that finger with
the middle finger on the same string
of fret behind. So I'm affecting bending
with two fingers once. Sometimes I also bend notes
with my index finger. I do this by maintaining a hooked finger and turning the finger
to bend the string. Another inflection tool
that can help to ramp up the dynamics of a
solo is unison bans. When we're doing unison
bands were playing two notes and then
bending the lower note while keeping the high note until the two nodes become
units are the same note. Adding some overdrive
to this can enhance the dissonance as
those two notes get closer and closer
to being in unison. Now that we've talked about some approaches for
good inflection, Let's talk about some
other ways that we can make our guitar
solos sound musical.
6. Phrasing: This lesson is all
about phrasing. When a vocalist writes a melody, that melody will naturally
be punctuated by short rest. This is because if the
vocalist ever intends to perform the melody
in a live setting, they're going to
need to stop every once in awhile to breathe in. Guitar players don't share the same biological requirement to take a rest
every now and then. Hypothetically, you can play for an infinitely long
amount of time without ever having the
need to take a rest. But the result is pretty
challenging to listen to. Anecdotally, if you have any experience with
the type of person who talks a mile a minute without ever taking
a break for arrest. You might understand
how hard it is to understand what they're saying
when they talk like that. In a nutshell, thinking
about phrasing means thinking like a vocal by stringing together
short fragments of musical ideas that are
punctuated by rest. In this lesson,
we're gonna go over a couple of different
ways to conceptualize. One way that you
can conceptualize phrasing is to think about the concept of creating an expectation and
then subverting it. We can do this by
playing a line. And then to create
an expectation will play the same
exact line again. And then we can subvert
that expectation by maybe changing the ending of
the line the third time, or by playing a totally
new line the third time. This is a pretty compelling way to create great
sounding phrases. It also helps to think about phrasing the same
way that some people talk about rhyming schemes
in poetry or in lyricism. So some popular rhyme
schemes like AABA, ABAB, a BAC, or AABB, can be used to construct
some pretty cool phrases. You can also think about
phrases thematically. So maybe I start each phrase with similar inflection idea. So maybe I'll start each
phrase with a slide in. I can also string a
series of phrases together by starting
each phrase with a band. A very common type
of phrasing and music is called
call and response. This is where I
play one phrase and I consider that to be a call. And then I think about my second phrase as the
response to that initial call. Sometimes when I'm thinking
about colon response, I imagine two different singers, maybe a duet between a male
voice and a female voice. In which case, the calls
can generally be in a lower register and the responses I might put
them in a higher register. Or I can do the opposite
with the calls and a higher register and the
responses in a lower register. Or I could use a noticeably
different tone for the call phrases than I do
for the response phrases. Now that we've talked about some different phrasing ideas, let's see what happens
if I try some of these out over the backing
track that I made?
7. Swear Words: When I was younger, I studied with a great bebop musician. And while I learned
a lot from him, I often laugh thinking
back about how whenever I would play
this one specific thing, he would look at me very sternly and tell me to stop swearing. Now, in this lesson, I'll explain to you
exactly what it was that I was doing that
gave him this reaction. But first, let me say
something about swear words. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld famously never uses
swear words in his act. When people magazine asked
him about this, he said, it makes it too easy for the comedians and I think
we should work harder. Now, who might argue
with Jerry Seinfeld? But I know that personally, my experience with swear words
has been much different. When I was saving money
to go to music college, I worked in a factory for this wonderful
group of Irish met. And the way that they would
swear was like poetry. Naked express a broad range of emotions with a really
small handful of words. And the sentences that
they would create, none of which are
repeatable here. We're not only captivated,
but very expressive. In a musical context. What was I doing that
my teacher was so offended that he deemed
it analogous to swearing. It's simple. I was repeating ideas. And while this might be a little bit of a cop-out
in a bebop songs. In pop music, repeating
phrases can be a really great way to build
energy through a solo. The most effective way to do
this is to take odd numbers, preferably 35 or seven, and build phrases that are either 35 or seven
beats in length. A really prominent
example of this is on the intro of
Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Good. While this line only consists of two nodes, it's occupying the space
of three eighth notes, because the firstNode is
occupying the space of two eighth notes in the second node is
occupying the space of one. Here's another example,
and it's taken from a Jeff Beck solo that
I learned years ago. In this example, the phrase
lasts for five beats. To get started with working
on your own swear words, all you need to do is think
about creating phrases that consist of 35 or seven nodes. That sums it up for my
thoughts on swear words. Now, all that's left to do is start putting
everything together.
8. Putting It All Together: So now it's time to
put it all together. In this video, I'll be
taking everything that we went over with
respect to vocabulary, inflection, phrasing,
even swear words, and using that to create
three example guitar solos. In the first solo, the dynamic shape will be
low and Bybi throughout. The second solo will
be high-energy. And the third solo will
start low and n high. So let's get started
with the first solo. And this is the one where the dynamic shape
will be low and VB. Now here's the second solo, which is high energy. Here's the third solo, which will start low and high. Well, that wraps up my course on how to create your
own guitar solo. Thank you so much
for checking it out. If you'd like to reach
out to me directly, feel free to send an email to Dave and Dave Kirby music.com. You can also find me on
YouTube and Instagram. Or you can visit
my website where I've got a bunch more courses on music theory for guitars and improvisation
for guitar players. You can also sign up for one-on-one lessons
with me online. And you can sign up for my mailing list where
I'll send you my blogs about music gear and theoretical concepts
that I think are cool. Thanks again for
checking out the course. It really means a lot.
Dave Kirby, keep practicing!
