6 Levels To Playing GREAT Guitar Solos!

Hello everyone, my name is Ayla Tesler Mabe and today I am going to show you the six

levels

of

guitar

solos

and of course this is just my opinion. I just wanted to share my approach with you to hopefully give you some ideas. about taking things to the next level and learning to play the

guitar

and especially solo and improvising on the guitar is a lifelong journey so a lot of guitar music comes from the blues and I wanted to focus this lesson about the blues. and the reason for this is that if you can get through a 12-bar blues chord progression and really understand how to add a lot of color and nice, tasty things to your

playing

in this context, you can definitely apply it to many other contexts like Well, first thing What I wanted to show you is how to find the safe notes to go through a chord progression because that's the first step and so level one of the

solos

on the electric guitar comes down to the pentatonic scale in this particular lesson.

We're going to center things around a 12-bar blues in the key of a and blues is a really special type of music in its standard form in the sense that it falls between major and minor sounds, it kind of breaks the rules. that way, it gives you the opportunity to play major and minor pentatonic sounds when

playing

. Basically, the key to this being the case is the fact that this entire chord progression is over dominant chords and that's why we can use the minor pentatonic form. starting from the root note, we are on a here is a on the fifth fret, let's build our minor pentatonic scale from this note 5 8 5 7 5 7 5 7 5 8 5 8.

So that is the most basic form of the scale minor pentatonic and If you play that scale anywhere else on the neck because there are many different positions you can play it, you're still playing the same notes. Basically, now the next step is to realize that if you take that shape, you move it down three frets. We're going to play a major pentatonic and literally the exact same scale shape. In this case, we're going to play two five two four two four two four two five two five, so if I play on the backing track any of the notes of that minor pentatonic scale it's going to give me that blue z minor pentatonic sound, all of those notes are sure and now if I wanted a major version of that just go down three frets, I can literally play the exact same thing, I can go back and forth between them, it's a really good skill to work with as a guitarist, you'll get a lot out of it if you play in a minor key or minor, use your minor pentatonic form, all those notes will be safe for you. to choose from, so let's say we're playing in A major over this kind of chord progression, for example, use your major pentatonic and then if we're playing a blues in A and you know, over the dominant chords, these kind of blues chords you have the opportunity to use major and minor, now that we have our foundation established, let's move on to level two, which is developing a lick vocabulary, the reason why I think this is so important, especially if you are just starting to learn to improvise and create. your own kind of melodies on the guitar is what many people discover when they first become familiar with the pentatonic shapes and begin to internalize them and, under their fingertips, discover that it sounds like they are just playing. a scale and it doesn't sound like a real musical expressive phrase and I've been there, it was a big struggle I faced when I was starting my guitar journey and something that helped me remedy this was building a Vocabulary of Licks that I found online from others players who listened to my favorite music wherever I was and that I could use as a basis in my solos so I could take these licks and I could put them all together and sound like I was playing something really musical. and then over time the idea is that these licks really give you inspiration to come up with your own ideas and then you can find your own sound, so an example would be and I already mentioned this in previous videos.

If you've ever seen any of my other solo videos, you may have heard me talk about this before, but hey joe by jimi hendrix has that iconic opening move that I just transposed to the key of a because jimi hendrix a lot of his way to play is in minor pentatonic and major pentatonic, so it's easier to apply that to any other key as long as you find where it falls in the pentatonic shape, but here's the thing and that all comes from the minor pentatonic scale and the beauty. If I really learn this lick, I'll be able to use it in my solos, so to review how to play it, I'm here on the eighth fret of the string if, you do a full step and then you play five on the string. e string eight five on the b string and then this is a

great

blue z type phrase to learn how to play and it's just me bending the g string here and then going to the fifth fret landing on the seventh fret of the d string and then you finish that lick on the fifth fret of the G string and once you lower it, if you lower it three frets, it will totally work as a major pentatonic lick as well and it's not always the case that you can take any lick from minor and move it to major and vice versa, but very often you can do it, especially if you're just sitting in the pentatonic shape, so whenever you learn to lick, try it and see if it works if you learn it in major, try it. in minor, if you learned it in minor, try it in major, okay, so you don't have to just take licks from the pentatonic scale, sometimes finding a lick that is generally centered in that scale but falls outside of it also totally works and that.

It can be a

great

way to start adding sophisticated sounds to your playing without necessarily knowing what you're doing because the first step is just making the music and then understanding can come later if you want, but an example of this would be you. . I know the song Black Magic Woman, Santana's version of, of course, Fleetwood Mac original Peter Green. It ends with this really wonderful lick that I can again go down to major pentatonic. I think it sounds good, but the main reason I want to mention this is. When I started playing I didn't understand why I could play because I realized that this note here didn't belong in the minor pentatonic scale, but I knew it sounded good, but I understood it later and that takes us to level three. three is learning what kind of notes you can add to the pentatonic shape to add more color to your plane and to give you an example, that note I just played on that black magic woman lick is actually a note that comes from the scale of blues and It just so happens that every time you play a minor pentatonic you can use that note and essentially what happens is that the pentatonic scale becomes this one that was the blue note, there it is again and of course that extension It still works and if you move it down three frets.

It actually ends up working in that major pentatonic zone as well, although it comes from a different place and maybe that's another topic for another video, but simply put, you can add that note to the major or minor form, but in the case as a minor becomes the blues scale and we've been talking a lot about blues so it makes sense that you know that the blues scale would work in this context and it can turn your scale into something like this which gives you another note to which aim. when you're improvising now another example is a mode called dorian and that may sound scary because everyone is told to fear modes the thing is you don't have to fear them at all because all you have to do is convert the minor pentatonic in a pleasant one. friendly scale that we all love in a way is just adding two notes, so instead of playing this, we can play like this, there's the dorian note, we're adding the second one and then this note, the six and I'm just talking about the intervals or the colors of those notes if you don't know what that means I'm sure I'll make a video on that in the future it's worth watching but yeah what happens is the minor pentatonic becomes dorian if you add those two notes and then continue.

I moved up the scale and now, even without playing Dorian completely, if you just point to one of those notes, we add something like this, which is a nice pentatonic lick, it can turn into something like this, so I played with the same notes there, but I added that. color and suddenly it sounded a lot more sophisticated so imagine you're playing the blues and that's an example of how those two notes can add so much so I know I've introduced you to a couple of theoretical terms I think the biggest takeaway Trust in your ear and try to explore notes outside the pentatonic scale and if you find that they sound good, then they are good.

That's the end of the story, but of course feel free to try the scales found in the diagrams. in this video try them out, see what you think, just try adding even one of those notes and see what happens, but bottom line, explore and trust your ear, so I've been giving you some scales that work for a whole progression of chords because sometimes it's good to just focus on well, I'm on a. I'm going to pick a scale that sounds good throughout the progression and just riff on that for a while because I don't want to think that I want to be.

I'm trying to explore with my ear and play with emotion and that's great, but for number four, this is level four. The number four is following the changes because in a 12 bar blues you start with a dominant chord in this case and you're on this chord for a while and then you go to chord four which is d7 and then you go back to a7 then we go to our chord five e7 then we go back to d7 and then we go back to a7 and then we finish with e7 and that's a really typical 12 bar form of blues that you will definitely find, like I said, choosing a scale to work with all those chords.

I'm going to show you how you can find the arpeggios of our iv and v chords so that you can then end up with something like this. just pentatonic, look, I outlined that chord and then when I get to the fifth chord, you can do the same thing so you can start hearing those changes without them being there because you're outlining everything. of the chord tones into the chord tones you play, that is, the tones that belong to the chord you are playing, so there is this really useful dominant seven arpeggio form. I'm going to show you that you can apply it to any dominant chord, but They'll work especially well for this blues situation we're in here, so here we're playing on D7 our iv chord here's the shape of the arpeggio fifth fret a string four seven on the d string and then five seven on the G string seventh fret B string and then five eight on the high E string I played it wrong, wait, you got it, I went out of the arpeggio a little bit and did you notice that note actually sounded right?

There is an example of a small happy accident, this way if you like. to play over our e7 chord, e7 is two frets above d7, so it would be logical to conclude that we can take that dominant seven arpeggio, move it up two frets, and again add that other note to show that it works in any key in which you are. over any chord in that arpeggio shape works to add that extra special crash note, very good, okay, level five, things can start to get a little jazzy in the next step that we're going to take and of course, if you don't like jazz. music and you really hate it, you're not stupid, jazz is stupid, I mean just hit the right notes.

I know at least understanding where these approaches come from can be very helpful because you actually see it used in a lot of other styles as well, but essentially we've been looking at how we find all the right notes to play in a chord progression. You already know all the safe notes and all the notes that accentuate chord changes, but sometimes people think of all the safe notes but then link them all together. the safe notes along with a bunch of strange notes, but the reason you might want to do that is to build tension because there are a lot of emotions you can create in music when you build tension and then find a way to release it, like for example. this form of arpeggio, you see these notes on the high E string, I link them with all the notes in between because chromatic just means moving a semitone or in other words moving one fret up or down because that's how the guitar is laid out . but what can happen is that let's say you choose your target notes, let's choose these notes part of that d7 arpeggio this is our three five there are some little tricks that you can use to get started in this world of chromaticism, so the first one that What we saw a second ago is simply seeing two notes on the same string and simply filling all the space between them.

There is an example. Here's another approach. You can do the two fret up approach, where essentially these are our target notes that we're going to approach. all of them from two frets up and walk down chromatically sounds a bit jazzy, we can do the same thing from two frets down too it's cool and the next approach is the target note focus above below again, here's our target note, we start from one fret up Worry below the target and then now dothe same goes in reverse below the target and there are really no exceptions to this rule.

As long as you land on the correct target note, you will have found a way to resolve this tension. By creating and using any of those tricks that I just talked about, you're going to create a lot of cool tension, so to give you an example, let's say we're playing blues, I liked some of that, so it's something to try and I hope you have fun exploring that. Well, we get to level six and this is what I wanted to start with this level just because I really think that in general this is the most important part of the solos, but at the same time I wanted to put it at the end because I really wanted to realize the fact that that you know how to discover how to create interesting and smooth phrases when playing. and hitting all the right notes and sounding sophisticated and all of that is great and definitely part of the puzzle because finding the right colors in your playing can be a big part of what makes your playing evocative and expressive, ultimately that It's just a fraction of the puzzle that you can cheat on when you consider how important it is to play with finesse, feeling and soul, and I don't think it's a coincidence at all that most of the greatest players of all time had a thing in common, really, and That was the amount of finesse and feeling in their game and I also don't think it's a coincidence that it's very common to find players who have been playing for a long time and who are really experienced and who leave a lot of room in their game.

It's almost as if the wiser someone becomes with experience, the more they appreciate space and as Claude Debussy and later Miles Davis said, music is this space between the notes and that's what can separate a guitarist from a musician. and what I mean by that. When you're a guitarist you can be technically amazing and know how to fly up and down the neck and do crazy things, but a musician is someone who expresses music through their instrument, it's almost like they express the human experience in another. level where it feels like someone is almost speaking through their instrument and it's really interesting, sometimes people do little tricks like holding their breath while playing and then when they run out of breath the phrase stops because that sometimes it helps you improve your guitar playing. into something a little closer to telling stories like a person would when speaking with their own voice.

I also wanted to talk about some techniques that really help make the guitar as expressive as possible, like flexing, sliding, and vibrato again if you've seen my videos in the past. I've definitely talked a lot about this. You know the difference between a phrase like this and sometimes it can be the difference between a solo that's good and really great and a solo that's beautiful and moving again. It's up to you to decide how you want to approach soloing. I'm not saying that this is really the objective end of your journey as a guitarist or that I've discovered any secrets here, but I'm just pointing out the fact that you know how to do guitar expression can be something really wonderful and that's definitely something that many some of my favorite musicians have had in common, so again, when trying to think about whether you're playing a note or a phrase, can you add a slide between some of the notes?

Can you add a bend and can you work on your vibrato because that can be a big part of developing your own individual sound and fingerprint on the instrument? Because everyone has a different vibrato and it's great to discover how you express yourself on the instrument and again, all of these techniques are a big part of that, so that was Ayla's personal approach to soloing at six

levels

and even if you're not agree with everything i said, i hope this shows you that you know some examples of where your plane could go or where you hated.

Everything I said solidified your own ideas contrary to what I said and I think that's the best part of having a discussion, so I hope this gave you some ideas on where to go next in your guitar playing. and leave a comment below. Below is the tip that has helped you the most to do alone and have a wonderful day.