How To Write Solos That SHRED!

[Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] hey I'm Jake Lizzio and in this video I want to walk you through the entire process of composing an advanced technical fast lead line or solo now I'm going to be teaching this on a guitar but these concepts and strategies apply to any instrument you're interested in writing leads with the track we're gonna be writing in is in a Lydian and to find out why it's in a Lydian I highly suggest you head over to shred master Scott's YouTube channel and check out his video on writing modal music I recently stumbled across this content and found some great lessons on writing neoclassical harmony so I got in touch with him and we decided to do a little collaboration on modes now before we start writing a lick it's important to think of general strategy here it's too easy to just play a bunch of notes it's the easiest thing in the world is to just you know spam notes on your guitar until people are nauseate admire and I personally got sick of that style really early on in my guitar playing what I would recommend is to try to find a way to harness that speed and that ferocity into something a little bit more melodic and interesting and the strategy I decided to use here was to find a simple motif a simple theme that we could kind of latch on to something that wasn't shreddy something that wasn't fast just simple and then we could kind of pepper that throughout the solo and in between each of these nice little pockets of stability we could kind of throw in some really fast stuff in between and in this case that strategy worked out pretty well the main theme that I ended up writing was extremely simple over the a chord it just plays a c-sharp note which is the major third and then it goes up the scale to hit the fifth E and the rhythm there is one two and a three four and ring then when the B chord comes up we have the same thing just in Reverse one two and A three four so it's a nice little thing theme a nice little call-and-response and you'll see variations of this in different octaves and little references to this throughout the entire solo so I've got a very simple theme here one two and two three and our theme starts right on the one beat what I wanted to do is get to that one beat by doing a scale run that takes us to that one beat and I decided I wanted to do three E and a four E and a one so before this theme comes up we're gonna have a scale run that does da da da da boom da Dom what notes do we put there well we could put anything there but a simple thing we could do is just go up the scale until we hit that note and I wanted to do three E and a four E and a one so to figure out how to get to this note I just count backwards I can just do three E and a four E and a one I'm just going through the scale backwards and it took me through this note B so if I start here on the B then I'll get three E and a four E and a one and it takes me right to where I need to be so that's how I kick off the guitar solo is not just with one two and a three I started off with three E and a four E and a one two and a three it gives it a little bit of kind of a kick start before you get our theme so now the B chord comes up and we do that same little theme in Reverse but once again we do a little scale run to get their first three guiana oriano one two and three the exact same rhythmic cycle as before so there's not even a variation there it's a very obvious and strict reference between the rhythms there and the themes there [Music] now our next lick is over a B chord so I figured we could tap out a B major triad with a be a D sharp and an F sharp right here and I decided to do this as a quintuplet pattern so five notes per beat and the five note pattern goes one two three four five one two three four five one two three four five and all you got to do to time that up is find a good way to count fives you know practice with your metronome 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 and I use the Indian phrase toddy demon it's way faster than counting to five so tot agin of them kata game of the pot again Adam pada game of the pot and that's literally what I'm counting in my head as I go through the simple tapping pattern but like I said it's just a B major and then it's a B sus 4 I still have my B and I still have my d sharp and I've just got the e right here so I'm tapping a little bit of a be sus 4 arpeggio and this is all over the B major chord but now the chord switches to a so all I do is I leave my middle finger there and I come back to tap out an a major arpeggio still with the fives so it's nice to introduce quintuplets it's nice to have a little bit of rhythmic variation you know to not ever have everything just sixteenth notes or triplets quintuplets give a little bit a variety and it's easy to tap them it's way easier to tap them than it is to pick them so I thought it would be nice to have a little bit of quintuplet variety in there and it doesn't sound really weird or awkward it just sounds like some cool tapping in my opinion now to add some more rhythmic variety we bring in some eighth note triplets will see some more later on but just going down the scale and that takes us to this note right here which is e which prepares us to hear that same reference of our same theme once again so we went on a little adventure we went a little tapping safari and then we came back to land back at our theme an octave lower just the second half of that theme so it should sound kind of familiar to you at that point even if it's your first time hearing this guitar solo you know that lick when it comes up shouldn't sound foreign to you should sound like oh this is you know some familiar territory which word [Music] now right after we get that little bit of familiarity I thought it would be a great opportunity to introduce the Shred and a lot of shred is dependent on what is easy on your instrument you know there's certain things that are gonna be very easy to shred on your guitar that might not be so easy to shred on your on your keyboard or a different instrument so you know keep in mind linear patterns are usually a little simpler and this pattern you're about to see is one of the faster patterns I can play and that's just because of the geometry of the guitar it's set up to be able to be easily played fast and the pattern sounds like this I'm using the a Lydian shape of three notes for strength and I'm using that root position shape here except I'm starting on the major seventh G sharp right here and here's what the pattern looks like I'm going up four notes of the scale and then back down but then I go up six notes of the scale so it's one two three four five six one two three four five six now I can reset all over again just on this new string I'm gonna start here with my index finger one two three four five six one two three four five six I'm done with the pattern I can reset again on this string one two three four five six one two three four five six so this is a fun little patter you can start it anywhere and it gives you a fun little way to ascend or descend through a scale you could do in Reverse the same kind of idea we go down four notes one two three four five six one two three four five six and then we were set so this is a pattern that lends itself really well to the guitar it's want to practice many times and that's it's an easy one to shred and this is a great excuse to use it all based in sextuplets right there six notes per beat 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 now once that ascending lick is over I decided to keep rolling with the sextuplets here but with a much easier pattern it's just really fast it's a 6 note pattern that goes 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 this is a really fun lick to practice if you haven't practiced it before it lends itself really well to playing fast you can do it with legato no picking at all and you can move it around it through a scale so that's all I did is in this position we're in a Lydian moving up to the next note in a Lydian is the F sharp and then the G sharp and then the a and then the B so connecting those together you get this and that's all I did was just connect up through the scale with that simple sextuplet pattern and then finally once I reach this B note I decided to change things up we've had a long string of just constant sextuplets right it's kind of little nauseating at this point let's break it up with some simple eighth note triplets 3 triplet 4 triplet and a little bit more contrast here I think this is the most contrasting lick in the whole solo I've got this little slide that jumps me all the way up to my highest fret and then back down for this trill and then into a really difficult for me it was difficult to the sliding lick that just kind of jumps around through a bunch of different chord tones and it ends up being a lot of the notes of the E major 7 arpeggio but I don't really want to say that it's outlining in arpeggio I want to say it's just kind of a fun slide lick but it's the lick that took the most practice anytime you're doing one of these links where there's lots of sliding around like that to me it's a mess because your precision has to be just right so I just kind of liked the way it sounded I practiced it until I could play it that was the lick it's nice to have triplets breaking up the flow of all those you know sextuplets and sixteenth notes I thought it was a cool sounding life [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] now the next lick is a very simple arpeggio pattern over the a chord we're just playing an a major seven arpeggio and I'm outlining it with this shape that I've mentioned before in my video on a major seven arpeggio as I mentioned the shape and how it fun it is to sweep through it and easy it is to sweep through it so all I do is just go up it a little bit and then back up and down it so we're just using the arpeggio itself is kind of like a scale random just kind of going up and down it and then I let it connect me to a full a major arpeggio not an a major seven and this is where the sweet picking starts now if you are a guitar player sweet picking is a pretty difficult technique and it's not one that I can often find a reason or excuse to use but when the topic is hey shred then I think a good this is a good opportunity to bust out the sweet picking and what I'm doing here is the first sweep ends up being six notes per beat but then afterwards we actually going into the septuplet vil it ends up being seven notes per beat because I cheat my sweeps I do an upstroke for this pull off and then I do another upstroke here and then I do another upstroke here and a good guitar player would not double pick this note but I'm not good enough to skip that note so I just leave it in there and I double pick it as part of my sweep so it gets struck twice at the end of an arpeggio so the first sweep is clean but then the next one is that double note in it and it ends up being seven notes per beat so you just kind of have to be aware as you're playing to really time up your beats well or you need to practice more than I do and get it so you can sweep that fast without cheating it like that and keeping it totally six notes per beat I think there's a total argument that I'm doing it the wrong way and that the right way is to do with six notes per B but I don't really mind it that much and like I said it would take an incredible amount of practice for me to be able to play it at that speed with the right picking anyways we connect that to a B major arpeggio which is the same sweeping pattern all the way up and down with that little thing at the end the little setup what's at the end and then I use that to come down sixteenth notes through my Lydian scale alright just down the scale with a simple little pattern little doubling up on some notes and once I get to this note I play some eighth note triplet strip pull it and then I return to that same theme we heard just an octave lower than we were before and that's where the solo starts to fade out so you know hopefully by the time we do finally get to that beam after all the sweet picking and all that craziness it's like ah we're finally where we need to be and it feels like a hopefully like a career ittin the you know the story is over at that point it feels like a good resolution to that solo so now let's try to keep all that stuff in mind as we take one more listen to the solo [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] now for somebody like me this project is quite a bit of work to write a technical solo and then practice it is it takes a lot of time and I got most of it written on the first day but then after sitting on it and you know kind of editing things in my head I changed some things the second day to where I liked them and then I added in something I couldn't play so I had to practice that so you can imagine that a lot of technical music stuff like Dream Theater Haake and progressive rock that stuff is very well composed and it takes a lot of time to write those solo sections that you're so enthralled by especially the ones where it's two musicians you know playing in harmony that wasn't improvised most likely that was composed you know if they were playing in harmony that means they know exactly what they're doing with one another so you know you can improvise fast stuff you can improvise great solos but at a certain point time if you're trying to get that technical shred impressive lead sound I suggest you write you compose you put meaning into it you put intention into it you try to find little similarities and you know you listen back to things and you find out what can you do when does it get a nauseating when are you doing too much shred what does it get boring when are you not doing enough shred and trying to balance those things is a really tough process in my opinion hope I'm happy with how this turned out I think I could have done better and hopefully the next time I'd go through this process I end up with something even better but more importantly I hope you learned something through watching this process and hearing it all develop if you enjoyed this video please thank my patreon supporters for making these videos possible they're the only sponsors I'm willing to work with at this point and they're the reason these videos exists also big shout out to shred master Scott for his inspiration on this video please check out his channel leave a nice comment and subscribe if you're interested in anything along those lines I think he's got really great content there so thanks for watching and I'll see you next time you [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 103,519

Keywords: jake lizzio, signals music, signals, shred, shred guitar, guitar shredding, lydian shredding, how to shred, write shred, shredding guitar, shredding solos, how to solo, write guitar solos, write shredding, make a shredding solo, write shredding solos, write shred guitar, lydian mode, lydian scale, advanced guitar lesson, advanced theory lesson

Id: GVtxw5KGZuM

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020