How To Easily Make Cool Guitar Licks For Your Solos And Improvisations

How To Easily Make Cool Guitar Licks For Your Solos And Improvisations

By Tom Hess

To get better at improvising guitar solos, you need to make ideas that:

-Tie-in well with all of the other ideas in your guitar solo

-Express the precise emotions you want them to express

Tons of guitarists have a hard time improvising because they play faster than they can think. Having the ability to think ahead when improvising and being able to make the best phrasing choices becomes very difficult... Have you had this same problem?

The following video demonstrates this issue and how it is solved:

Here is a major secret that most guitar players are unaware of:

Simply thinking faster will not make you better at improvising. Instead, you need to think about these things:

1. Finding ways to get more time to think during your solos. (you can do this while playing fast too)

2. Greatly reduce the number of things you have to think about as you improvise. This way you can clearly express yourself while making better musical choices.

These five tips will help strengthen your improvisation skills:

Guitar Improvising Tip One. Get Ready For Success

Don’t wait until the last moment to think about what to play next. Many guitar players do this and it causes them to struggle to play creatively/make great musical choices. You need more time to think about what to play next. Do this earlier.

For instance: If you come up with a short lick that is only eight notes in length (Lick 1), don’t try to think of what you should play next (in Lick 2) during note seven or eight. Instead, begin thinking about what to play next during the very beginning of the phrase (in lick 1)

Play the first phrase with your fingers while focusing on what should come next with your brain.

Watch the video at 1:04. This shows you how to prepare for success before improvising.

Guitar Improvising Tip Two. Squeeze Value From Each Phrase

Many guitarists only play a single phrase before moving onto an entirely different phrase. This is how they build their entire solo, and it is very hard to keep this up (constantly thinking of completely new ideas). It also makes it harder to express yourself while you play.

Do this: Make up variations while you are improvising. This will give you more time to think in between each musical idea, plus it helps you play with better phrasing and more creativity.

Here are ways to come up with improvisations in your guitar phrasing:

-Repeat the same phrase over and over while using different rhythms, but keeping the pitch of the notes the same.

-Repeat the phrase over and over but change only the pitch, keeping the rhythm the same.

-Change the rhythm a little each time you repeat a phrase.

-Use vibrato in at least 3 or 4 different ways.

-Use techniques such as slides, pull-offs or tapping to add variety to your phrases.

-Use scale sequencing to make the phrases you play more musical and creative.

This video helps you learn how to make expressive variations from your guitar licks.

Guitar Improvising Tip Three. Know How To Practice To Become A Better Improviser

To get better at improvising, you need to practice it... not just solo mindlessly over backing tracks.

To do this, come up with particular goals that you want to achieve with your practice time. The goals you choose will be based on your personal lead guitar playing skill level. An excellent guitar teacher helps you pinpoint any issues in your playing so you can achieve your musical goals and improvise at a high level.

For instance, these are a few improvising goals:

-Work on improvising while using the third, fourth and fifth positions of the Melodic minor scale.

-Create 25 – 30 different variations while soloing over a backing track within just a few minutes’ time.

-Start and end the phrases of your licks on consonant notes (these are notes within the chord you are soloing over).

-Master a particular type of non-chord tone and start making guitar licks that use it. (Example: passing tones.)

To get better at improvising, your musical goals have to be very specific. You need to know as soon as you’ve achieved your goal, and the more specific you can be about your goal, the quicker you will be able to achieve it.

This eBook shows you exactly how to play killer guitar licks with fire and emotion.

Guitar Improvising Tip Four. Make Full Use Of Silence

Don’t have enough time to think about what you want to play next in a solo? Just stop playing for a few moments. You read right. Stop playing guitar and let it go silent.

Remember, almost no guitar solos contain a continuous, non-stop stream of notes. They often contain at least some silence in between notes or phrases. To improvise at a high level, you need to use a balance of silence and sound. By doing this, your solos will become much more expressive and you’ll be able to get the listener to feel how you want them to feel.

The reason silence is so powerful is that your listener expects to hear something... but when they don’t, they are surprised. This generates a lot of musical tension for you to release.

Learn more information about building musical tension in guitar solos.

Warning: This approach can be easily overused (rendering it ineffective), so make sure that you do not insert too much silence by using good general balance in your phrasing.

Guitar Improvising Tip Five. Take-In The Backing Track Before Playing

Before you begin improvising over a backing track, let it play for a few moments. This will help you because:

1. You get a good feel for how fast the chords of the song/track are changing, which chords are being used and how the music feels in general. This gets you ready so you can make good musical choices during your improvisation.

2. The listener generally wants to hear a little bit of the backing track too before the solo begins.

This is a basic tip, but it will help you improvise much better.

Use the tips I’ve discussed here to quickly improve your lead guitar playing and reach your improvising goals.

This lead guitar eBook show you how to add emotion to any guitar lick.