The Ultimate GUITAR SOLO Guide

[Applause] there's a lot of ways to approach the guitar solo but ultimately the chords dictate what you can't play or maybe what you shouldn't play how much should you take the chords into consideration when you play do you follow them and if so how what do you do if there's an outside or a weird chord what scales do you use there's a lot of questions questions i get every day so here are the answers so let's start with the most basic thing as possible there's just one chord playing a d major and you have to play over it so before jumping into scary skills let's look at the d major chord itself and we see that there's just three notes the chord is made of a or let's put them in the right order the d the f sharp and the a right so are you ready this is gonna sound epic [Music] hey that sounds boring af bro why is that well because when playing just the notes from the chord we don't create any tension we just play the chord higher up the neck and without tension and release there's never a good story so let's add two other notes to the three notes we already have that do create a little bit of tension nothing too spicy yet so we got that first note and then a bit of tension sort of release sort of release and tension and release and guess what i'm playing right now this is the holiest of holy scales for us guitarists the pentatonic scale the five magical notes everyone loves and that is why it's by far the easiest scale to play over any chord because there's just a little bit of tension and a lot of release so there's a lot of right notes and just a little you just can't go wrong playing this skill let's have a listen [Music] so d major d pentatonic a minor chord just use a minor pentatonic so one thing you might try is add just one little note in between of those five notes from the pentatonic scale let's have a listen so this is a chromatic note i add to those five notes from the pentatonic scale chromatic notes can be seen as notes that don't fit the skill you are playing in so in this case notes not found in the scale of d major a place that works like a charm is between the second and the third note this note can be called a blue note the minor third in a major context this adds just a little bit of spice or flare into the mix and do you know what we created the blue scale i made a full video about it by the way feel free to check it out over here anyway this is how it sounds [Music] so just to put out there i'm keeping all the examples as straightforward and easy as possible because i remember all too well that lasting at the conservatory iron man just like oh yeah just play d mix lydian and the chromatic notes from here see you next week so i don't want that i'm just playing as easy and straightforward as possible for a minor chord we can use the minor blues scale and then we put that little blue note in between the four and the five like b minor blues [Laughter] lovely by the way what we're doing is not a beginner to pro kind of thing these are just different options we're branching out like exploring different sounds anyway a next stage could be to turn that pentatonic or blue scale into a diatonic scale so not five not six but seven different notes diatonic is just a fancy word that entails skills like major or minor and even the most you might have heard about like dorian mixolydian lydian so let's jump into the good old major scale a scale with seven unique notes so even more notes to create tension with and besides the pentatonic scale this is probably the most obvious pick to play over just a major chord [Music] sweet so before we continue with the logical road i really want to touch upon two fun ideas that d major chord leaves a lot of room for interpretation so remember the d major chord is just a chord with three notes the diatonic scale has seven notes so the other four notes from the scale are not set in stone so this might not be the most obvious choice for most of you but i just want to put it out there because it's a lovely sound the lydian mode d lydian [Music] [Music] do [Music] sounds kind of nice right very open and bright it's almost the same as the major scale but now that fourth note [Music] let's just play one fret higher sharp four one two three [Music] so that sounds lovely over just a d major chord if you're new to this you can think of playing an a major scale or an f sharp minor scale and just play that in a d context like a [Music] or f sharp minor but always think of the notes in relation to the d so although that lydian is quite an interesting sound you don't hear it that often a second and more obvious pick would be mixolydian immediately transporting us to that more bluesy realm [Music] [Music] mixolydian so now the only thing we changed from the major scale is that seventh note [Music] we lowered that by one semitone to a flat seven and we get that sound and i tried spicing it up a little bit with the blue scale the major blue scale that works like a charm anyway time to ease up a bit dial back now we have a bunch of options to play over just one chord but it's time to add something else in the mix let's add a chord often seen in the key of d major the g so now we got a one four chord progression in the key of d so now what do we do so the first option might surprise you just ignore it yeah play from the heart and use your ear and just see what comes out so never think this is worth less or somehow inferior this is actually a good way to start improvising and funny enough it's probably also something that everyone strives for in a sort of an end goal to just play by heart know so many things but when you start playing just forget about everything and just play anyway this is still the early stages so let's just forget about it [Music] so why this works is because they are what we call diatonic chords they belong to the scale of d major but we can try something else with this too so instead of ignoring that g and just wigging it we're going to highlight it how well the easiest thing is to use target notes we see in the g chord but not in a d chord and highlight these in our playing for example when we look at the g major chord we see a b note and a g note that we don't see in the d chord so for me a way to visualize this is to use the gauged system but you can also just to remember the notes for me the cage system really works when playing so let's see how that sounds [Music] [Music] so that's the thing but maybe you heard like the danger here right just like in the beginning where we played just the notes from the chord itself it can lack some tension or some spy so you don't want to overdo it if you really overdo it it starts it starts sounding really boring and i think i overdid it a little bit just now but let's have a listen how like overkill how it sounds [Music] it just sounds way too obvious right so it's not really interesting but you can use these target notes really well to for example and licks with because it shows you are aware of the cores that are underneath it and you are just on top of your game so that lick i played over here i think that worked really well actually with this progression so this way of looking at chord progressions will get you through the majority of all backing tracks pop songs nowadays because they use the diatonic chords only chords built from notes just within the scale in this case d major the chords found when we harmonize the major scale so these chords are in key of d d major or d e minor f minor g a b minor c diminished or usually we play it as a seventh chord so it becomes half diminished or minor seven flat 5 and then so we can add any of these chords and just still stick to playing d major the scale of d major and the cool trick i want to show you is the following so on the chords we we can add all these chords right so if we play d major we play d major pentatonic let's say we add a major then we can play a major pentatonic we add b minor and we can play b minor pentatonic and if we add g major we can play g major pentatonic and if you do it it sounds like this d major a b minor g major [Music] and back to d so now i only used the pentatonic scales of the chords that were playing and believe it or not all the notes i played still belong to the d major scale just seven unique notes of everything i played just now that's amazing right if you think so too just gently squeeze that like button if you're just excited about this stuff as i am it means a lot for me it's free for you it's good for karma thank you so much okay so we're going well so far but there's always a point where you encounter a chord that somehow just doesn't seem to fit in and it can be many things a borrowed chord modal interchange an outside chord and when that happens you'll hear that one or more notes from the skill you were playing just seemed to clash with that chord that's playing so i had this very recently with the track when a buddy of mine wrote him sifan you know him from this video where he taught you some sweet old jazz he asked me to play a solo on his upcoming record and he had a chord progression that sounded like this so it's d to g and g minor so what happens when we just play over it and ignore it oh wait a second oh that's not good so what's happening so we hear a d chord followed by a g still diatonic chords but then a g minor chord so that g minor is not a diatonic chord it's a strange chord so what's happening well only one thing changes the b becomes a b flat so now we've got multiple options an option one and this is the easiest but it's not my favorite by the way but more on that later we sort of superimpose the g minor pentatonic scale over that chord so we stick to d pentatonic mostly and then when the g minor happens i'm so excited uh let's jump to the g minor pentatonic scale it sounds like this d major pentatonic [Music] do this is a lovely way to start exploring switching skills and modes and all the things you've got you have to be aware of the chords it's fun but it's also very tricky if you've never done this before because you just can't miss it because then you everyone will know you messed up because it just sounds horrible so one tip for this is try finding the patterns more or less in the same place where you were playing because this way you can just extend the lines you were playing already and change them to the new skill instead of just having to start all over when that weird chord is happening one example just let me overdo it wrong d and then g minor d major right oh g minor so that way you're just too focused on the chord and you neglect your musical lines entirely so always make them flow through the changes uh and just make it sound great but i'd love to show you one more option so i always try to see how that new note that b flat in this case how it fits in the scale i was already playing so let's take again that d major pentatonic scale what if we only changed that one note the b flat so don't play g minor pentatonic or the g minor chord but just play d major pentatonic but then see what notes clashes and it's the b because the b becomes a b flat and then we get a cool little scale it's sort of [Music] sort of i don't know i don't think it has a scale really it's sort of harmonic major but then we don't play the seventh so it's just like one two three five flat six [Music] so that way we link the sound of what we played even more to the new chord that's happening and it doesn't become too obvious let's let's try it let's see if we can work it [Music] out [Music] this is really my go-to method i try to change the least notes as possible so the sound stays connected to what i'm playing before and the coolest thing i discovered is playing that d major pentatonic with that lower six just sound awesome too when you're just playing it on the d major chord i mean this [Applause] it's just so awesome so we're circling back to the first bits of this video now i hope you see it so just endless loops of discovering exploring finding new sounds creating different feelings emotions and all while doing this understand what's happening it's an easy way to really give things a place at least for me it is it works great for me but as i said never underestimate the power of just playing by heart and ear because when you learned a new concept like maybe something you learned in this video your ear might tell you a lot of new fresh ideas in the future to work with right so it's so like putting it in your system and letting your ear and heart work from there anyway guys thank you so much for watching it's really awesome that you check it out i just really appreciate it i love you really i love you all have a great day and catch you guys in the next one cheers you

Channel: Paul Davids

Views: 1,716,875

Keywords: paul davids, scales, guitar solo, how to solo, guitar solo guide, notes, pentatonic, scale, major scale, minor, modes, lesson, guitar solo basics, everything you should know, guitar lesson, davids, guitar, video, tutorial, solo like a pro, solo guitar, improvise, how to improvise, beginner, pro, beginner to pro, how to

Id: NbNH_C3QAS0

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021