Playing Your First Guitar Solo

Welcome to the tenth lesson of the Lead Guitar Quick-Start Series. In this lesson, we’ll be taking a look at how to play your first solo on the guitar. We’ll be combining everything you’ve learned so far throughout the series and playing a solo that’s been written out for you.

The solo here is pretty simple, and will use only the techniques and scales that you’ve already learned. We’ll be using the major scale, the major pentatonic scale, and the minor pentatonic scale, but we’ll be moving the minor pentatonic scale shape from a G minor pentatonic up the fretboard to an E minor pentatonic scale shape. You may want to spend some time practicing the scale in this new position before you continue on through this lesson.

There’s a new jam track for you to play this solo with, and it’s 24 bars long. The first 16 bars are over a G major chord, then two bars of E minor, two bars of G major, two bars of E minor, and you’ll finish off bar 23 and 24 on a G major. These 24 bars are then repeated four times. Take some time to listen to the jam track and really get a feel for it before attempting to play along with it.

Once you’ve learned this solo, pull up the jam track so you can play your solo over music. After that, you can experiment using different scales along with the jam track to make up your own solos. Just be sure to match up your scale with the key that’s being played in the jam track.

As you go through the solo, you’ll want to break it down and learn it measure by measure. Don’t forget to use all the tips from the last video, like phrasing, creating dynamic solos, emphasizing the root note, and everything else you’ve learned.

In the next lesson, we’re going to take a look at some of the other major pentatonic shapes that you can use in your guitar solos.

Are you looking for more lead guitar lessons and relevant jam-tracks? Guitareo is Nate Savage’s step-by-step video training system. It has some great songs for lead guitar and it also covers many other important styles of music including rock, country, fingerstyle, metal, classical, bluegrass, jazz, and more. Best of all it includes a huge library of original jam-tracks so you can apply everything to music.