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Tim
July 24th, 2007, 07:09 AM
I know most of you older Fretters are saying “NOT AGIAN”, but I have to beat this mental block I have on soloing.

So my question is: when learning to solo is it best to stay within one octave? For example, if I play in the key of “C” major starting at the 3rd fret – 2nd string, do I just play up to the next “C” (5th fret – 3r string)? Should I stay there and practice? The same question applies to playing in the keys of “C” major or minor?

For some mental block reason I can not get away from playing the scale up across the strings and then back down. I can not for the life of me figure out how to skip notes or play across strings.

Does anybody have any dynamite? I am really getting frustrated with this soloing thing. Maybe I should just stick with rhythm playing.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Spudman
July 24th, 2007, 08:00 AM
This one is simple - STOP playing scales.

Put in one of your favorite records and learn a couple of the solo's from the record. Once you start doing what other people are doing then you will understand that scales are like a room. They are a place that you can go that is familiar. But, once you are in that room you can do just about anything that you want to. If you copy a solo you are gong to be in that room doing your thing within that scale. Then you will understand how to use scales.

R_of_G
July 24th, 2007, 09:02 AM
This one is simple - STOP playing scales.

Great advice from Spud. When I was first learning to solo I hit the same wall, I knew a boat-load of scales and could play them all at a pretty good speed, but I still didn't know what to do with them. Eventually I stopped worrying about what to do with them and my playing opened up before me. I let my ears be my guide when I am soloing. The scales are a nice roadmap, but I try to look at them more as a set of usable directions to get from place to place but not as the only route. I believe I have said this once before, or maybe twice, but it bears repeating... when you start laying out all of the possible scales you can play at given time, you eventually realize that EVERY note can be the "right" next note to play. It's simply a matter of figuring out how to play that note {ie. how long, slide or not slide, bent or not bent, let it ring or follow it with three more quick notes, etc}. It may not be the note you intended to strike, but every note can work if played correctly.

If that approach is a little too daunting, stay within the scales when you solo, but realize all they are is a map of which notes sound "right" together. Play them in any order, in every order, skip notes in some of them. Take scales apart and make riffs out of them. You don't have to play every note in a scale to get a good solo, but the scales will narrow down for you which notes are in play to choose from [unless you like the approach where they are all in play].

Finally, if you really want an exercise to break you of scale-thinking and really focus you on building solos out different series of notes, I once more reccommend playing in what Ornette Coleman would call "Harmolodic " tuning. Tune all 6 strings to the same note. Then play until your finger fall off. In that tuning, you will quickly be forced to look outside of the familiar scales to construct solos, but when you return to regular tuning, your soloing will be much smoother and freed from the worry of scales.

aeolian
July 24th, 2007, 10:09 AM
I'm not much of a player, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

A few things I do when soloing are these. Play a phrase, then move up (or down) an octave and play the same thing again. Stay on one note, just playing it plain, or with vibrato, or bend a bit, or slide to it. I read somewhere that the longest solo with on just one note is something like 40 times on the same note. It may sound strange, but it can work very well. Consciously practice string skipping e.g. play 5th string 6th fret followed by 3rd string 4th fret. I take the standard pentatonic box pattern and do string skipping using the box finger pattern. Play across barre strings almost like a mini arpeggio. Take some double stop patterns and play the notes individually either up or down. An example of something like this is the one run in the solo in "Hotel California" where it is a descending run starting from the top string across 2 strings at a time using the pentatonic box.

kiteman
September 12th, 2007, 04:26 PM
Don't get too hung up on scales. Scales are useful as a collection of notes that sound good together so your main concern are the chord tones, root, 3rd, 5th, and 7th. The other notes of the scale (plus the ones that are outside of the scale like the b3, b5, and b7) are used to create tensions or leading tones that wants to resolve to the chord tones. If you play solo you play over the chords used in the song. The notes in the scale has certain degree of dissolutions and resolutions. You'll have to trust your ears on that one.

The solos are usually played over chords so you can play the scale that fits the chord or play a minor scale over the major chord like C minor over C major or play the scale of a chord before the one you're playing over like playing a B major scale over a C major chord.