How To Write a METAL Solo - Theory, Scales, Techniques, Strategies [GUITAR LESSON - COMPOSITION]

[Music] [Applause] hey I'm Jake Lucio and in this video I want to show you the steps in process that I take to writing a full metal solo something shredder if ik technical something impressive and fun to play to demonstrate this I'm going to be using a song that I wrote and a solo that I wrote and basically we need to understand the structure just a little bit here because before you write a soul you should understand what is my soul was supposed to do is it an intro solo is it an outro solo is it supposed to be just a quick little thing in the middle what we've got here is we have an intro riff and then we have a riff a and then we have riff B and then once riff B occurs that's the first introduction to the solo and then it'll go back to riff a after that so I decided to split my solo into two halves I wanted the one have to be more of an introduction to the insanity and then I wanted the second half of the solar to be real chaos just laying cities to waste and thrashing around and aggression so keeping that in mind that's how I crafted the two halves of the solo now when you're starting off a solo I think it's kind of lame to just play a note it can be fall flat when you just start off by playing a note one thing I've learned is that always works when you bend at the very beginning of guitar solo so in this case my riff here goes like this it's B the power chord by a followed by which kind of screams out be Phrygia if you know the B premium scale all those notes are are in B Phrygian I chose pentatonic to solo on top of this though because pentatonic has more aggression to it it's got more of a bluesy rock feel it doesn't have any of that exotic flare that Phrygian has when the Phrygian dominant has I wanted to save that exotic flare for later on in the song so I will use Phrygian dominant later on in this song just not in the solo that I wrote here so to start off the lead what I decided to do since we're in the key of B something I decided to band up to this note theme by starting on the a a whole step below it standing after that getting wild of vibrato it's a great way to introduce a solo and it matched the imagery I had in my head of like this King Kong like Beast living under the water and rising up and getting ready to attack everybody take a listen so from there we got to start getting into some actual notes pastures bends and since we're in pentatonic it's really easy to string together eighth note patterns just by going up and down and stepwise motion like this what I decided to do was do something like that just up and down the scale but I wanted to end on another a so I could do another Bend from an a to a B just the octave higher you might not notice that it's the same then but your brain will it's it's a nice little reference to what we just heard two measures earlier but eighth notes are boring so I decided to throw in some sixteenth notes with the pentatonic scale it's very easy to throw in sixteenth notes just by doing hammer-ons and pull-offs and not picking those notes so the lick I wrote went like this one and two and three and four and which is real simple one for him now let's copy that rhythm the rhythm pattern is one E and two and three and four and let's do the same rhythm twenty and two and three and four so if you put it together one en two three and four and one E and two and three and four and ten and that's the reference to my first Bend and you can see I've got that same rhythm in there twice that might make it a little bit easier on the ear [Applause] now the next lick was once again inspired by this imagery in my head of this bubbling water beast coming out and when I think of bubbling I think of lots of hammer-ons and pull-offs stuff like that or that's a bubbling feel to me and this is the thing you hear a lot of metal so it was what I'm doing is I'm on the twelfth fret with my first finger and I'm hammering on my pinky on 15 since I'm in deep Anna tonic it's the first note of the pentatonic and I'm doing a hammer-on and pull-off and then coming back to my ring finger on the note egg I'm gonna do that four times and then I'm just gonna end with three and four so it's like I made a video on the rhythm 3 plus 3 plus 3 plus 3 plus 4 this is that 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 and if you hear I ended it right there I'm ending with just another band but this is not a band from an a to a B so I've dropped that reference I am keeping this idea though of starting every two measures with a bend and that can get annoying right it can be kind of repetitive so I want to play a trick on you here I started here with a bad I started here with a ban but here I want to go up with a band and then follow up with a prebend like a down down instead I think that would be kind of a nice little change of pace from these three straight bends we've had up this one's gonna come up and come back down now a lot of these things that I've put into my solo you know most people aren't going to notice them on the tenth time or the twentieth time and it might not be till they write it out so they notice it but I really think that subconsciously all these little patterns and all these little symmetries you put into your solos I really feel make a big difference and I think that because that's what I see in other good solos when I learn another solo I all of a sudden realize there's there's this master plan at work that I wasn't aware of when I just was hearing it so I do advise you spend the extra mile and if you find a pattern or if you find something that starts becoming consistent maybe play on that for a little bit and then maybe take it away when it becomes too consistent so my next leg was this band up and then a unbend like that and then I've got a little bit of a blue scale around the blue scales great but when I play the blues scale I have no fear in adding in extra notes like the sharp seven instead so just by playing my blue scales I've got to be so right here a and B if I just add in the note in between there that a sharp right there then I get the seven note scale one two three four five six seven we're gonna live it's a really nice variation on Panasonic minor so this lick right here is built off of that idea of using the blue scale plus that major south now after that I figured we really need to get kind of get things ready for the next part of the solo which is going to be the crazy part and I wanted to start through doing something a little faster here so I came up with a pentatonic triplet pattern that just sounds like this and what that is is the pentatonic scale set up on one string so right here here are three notes of the pentatonic okay and what I'm doing is up is playing them descending one two three one two three one two three one two three and as a guitar player these one string licks are about - the easiest licks you're gonna learn because you don't have to switch strings it's really hard doing a lick like this you know setting up your pentatonic scale three notes per string and shredding up and down is really hard I've tried it I'm not good at it but if you're just on one string you should practice to be able to pick up some skills and getting that going pretty much after that I did three notes of the pentatonic scale once we put two two three triplet four triplet and then three notes of the pentatonic scale on the second string one triplet two triplet three triplet four triplet after that I started moving a little faster 1 triplet 2 triplet 3 triplet 4 triplet 1 triplet 2 triplet and then ending now when I recorded this I made a lot of mistakes in the recording process and I gave myself plenty of opportunities to do it over and over and over again till it was perfect that's the luxury of doing things in the studio you don't have to play them perfectly every time and a lot of these licks that you're gonna hear perfect on the recording I might not put the play perfect for you in this video cuz I had a practice that's pretty much all week in order to track it to the point that I was happy with it and yeah there were lots of mistakes in that process so you know another thing to keep in mind when you're hearing one of those incredible perfect solos in the studio just keep in mind that they had the luxury of spending all day to get it just perfect okay now it's time to get serious cuz this is the second part of the solo this is where I wanted to really go crazy so I wanted to make noise and get chaotic and the most chaotic thing I can think of is you're the most noisy sounding thing I can think of is the Unison vent we switch to the key of e suddenly it's a very metallic guy that's the wind tritone - all stuff from the Metallica scale and the lead I started off with an E and then I'm playing a D also on the second string and by bending that D up to the e it becomes a unison but along the way you get a lot of business and I love that sound I decided to combine it with a wah to really get some real mash in this area and this is what it sounds like now I still haven't like done shred yet I wanted to go up and down a scale and what I decided to do is to just throw together a mess of notes that are convenient for my finger that I can blast through this is the kind of thing you'd see a lot in Randy Rhoads so those even Kirk Hammett solos it's not really a scale it's like just a lot of notes that happen to work out well as a guitar player so that's what I did here as long as you know what you're doing I think that's a perfectly acceptable way to play things I started here on the note B and I basically went up the e Dorian scale and added in some notes of the tritone as well so I've got like mostly a Dorian with a tritone and then it kind of goes back to e pentatonic now the link itself looks like this this is all linear motion so it's all like stepwise notes there's no jumps and it makes it very easy to play as a guitar player but it's 22 notes long 22 notes and then an ending B so I mean what can that be if can't be sixteenth notes it can't be triplets well it could be eleven tuplets so I just decided to cram in eleven notes per measure and if you practice to a metronome and find out the notes to sync up to I know that the 11th note of this of this lick one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven one right there that's the next note that I have to sync up a beat to so when I practice to my metronome might have sunk up this note to the beat this note to the beam and that and I ended up with a lick that ended up being 11 notes per measure and I got to shred through it and then write on a one beat and it sounded awesome now in my opinion after something like that I want something a little bit of something to decompress I wanted some filler something noisy and and rambunctious again and I just went with straight beating scale here the blue scale in in this position very good movie and I did some double stops there and then really just following up and down with some simple scale patterns I think that of it is a throwaway lick I didn't put a lot of thought into it and I just wanted something that was just back and forth something that just took up space to get me to the next lick now once again in my mind I wanted noise I'm one of dissonance and I thought it would be cool to bend up to that B but then kind of Bend flat to that B so not quite get there and then along the way I accidentally grabbed a little bit of the that second string and I got more dissonance that I had planned so when I started practicing it after that my first lick was a bend up to B and then I played an E but then I come down a little flatter to bend it so my Bend doesn't quite reach B and then grabbing the tritone they're giving me a lot of noise and then coming to a B here to get me into my last lick now the next lick here the final lick I really wanted to end with some fireworks and I picked something straight out of the book of English Dean he's got the six note little pattern here one two three four five six one two three four five six and you can do with any position you can mute it with pentatonic you could do with you know major and minor I chose to just finally go into regular old a minor and let's work up the E minor scale using this six note pattern so I'd have these three notes these three notes and then and then finally now this is a lot of work this is the hardest work I can do as a guitar player and as a songwriter is write a metal solo you know I can write riffs in just a few minutes you've seen in the Metallica scale video it's it's just a matter of playing around with things but you know playing around with lead you're gonna get good sounding stuff yes but are you gonna get that solo the solo that like you know kids want to learn or like you know think of your favorite shows think of the soul is that you that made you want to play more guitar I doubt they were improvised unless you were listening to Pink Floyd you know peacfully is one example of a guy that just went into the studio and improvised a lot of solos and we really really liked what we heard but especially with metal and progressive rock you know that stuff is very well composed and it takes work it takes effort it takes planning it really helps to be able to record yourself and listen to your ideas and listen back and kind of come up with ideas in your head I can't tell you how many of these licks changed throughout the week as I was writing them you know I recorded something and then maybe I was you know driving and I and I thought you know I really don't like the way that lick sounds and I started thinking what can I do differently can I use a different scale can I do a different rhythm can I try a different Bend so a lot of the work doesn't have to be on your instrument a lot of the work can be in your head as you just kind of hit play in your head and listen to what you've written and then see what you don't like now if you really dig this song you can hear it two different ways I'm giving it to free for all my patreon subscribers but you're also gonna hear it in a video game that's the reason I wrote this a video game company called pixel maniacs from Germany got ahold of me and they asked if I might be able to make them attract for their video game called can't drive this it's a really cool idea for a video game where while you're racing somebody else is building the track at the same time and their way into metal and when I think of metal and driving games I think that's a perfect combination of like aggressive explosion type chaos going around you so that was kind of like my driving force through this entire thing is to write a good song that would complement that video game the game is available on Steam right now but they're planning on porting it to ps4 and switch and Xbox so I've linked to it in the description I highly recommend you check it out so I really hope this gives you some insight into the process of writing a guitar solo it's a lot of work but it is one of those skills that you develop it it is not a talent I just want everybody to dispel this idea of the guy that picks up a guitar and then like magic starts coming out and there's the perfect solo I've never seen that I'm sure it exists I'm sure there's people out there that talented and that good but in my experience that's not a practical image of how music is written it's usually blood sweat and tears and luck so this case lots and lots of work lots of practice and lots of time and to me it's all worth it though because at the end of the day I get an awesome metal solo that I get to shred in somebody's face so if you like this video and you want to see more videos like this you can consider supporting my patreon page the only reason these videos are gonna continue going forward is because I do have patreon subscribers so thanks to them and if you can't do that that's fine just like subscribe comment share this video with your friends that's good enough for me I'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 216,925

Keywords: jake lizzio, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, how to play guitar, metallica, metallica scale, metallica solo, write a metal solo, writing metal, how to write metal, writing metal leads, how to write a metal solo, metal music theory, guitar lesson metal, lead guitar metal lesson, metal lead guitar, metal lead guitar lesson, music theory metal, kirk hammet theory, kirk hammet solo, write like kirk hammet, sound like kirk hammet

Id: wuSJHUhacmI

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 19 2018