Use The Power Of Your Favorite Singer's Voice To Turbo Charge Your Lead Guitar Playing
By Tom Hess - 07/24/2012 - 12:23 AM EDT
Do your guitar solos sound very similar to each other? Are you frustrated by your lack
of ability to come up with fresh and inspiring lead guitar phrases?If
so, then you are not
alone. It is common for many
guitarists to get into the habit of using similar melodies and musical ideas when
creating guitar solos.
Some of this difficulty comes from the habit of listening to the same guitar
players on a daily basis and emulating their particular lead guitar
soloing style. However,
the
biggest reason why guitar
players tend to play solos that
sound alike is due to continuously
using thesame
process for creating lead guitar parts.
If you are like most guitarists, then you probably approach your guitar solos in the following way: you listen to the chords or riffs that you
will play over, and
then improvise some melodies until something feels right. This process
continues until you have
built a completed guitar solo.
Although
this approach is a legitimate way to approach soloing on guitar, you need to
realize that every time you use it, you are relying on the same guitar soloing
process as most other guitarists.As a
result, the guitar solos you create will have the same (or very similar) sound
to other musicians you know.
Before I explain a new and very
innovative way for you
to solo, I'd like to further illustrate my point above with an example of a popular guitar player by the name
of Yngwie Malmsteen. Yngwie
has a career spanning several decades, which he has built on his reputation as
an incredible lead guitar player. I bring this up to point out that he
is an example of a guitarist
who frequently uses the exact same approach to his guitar solos. I am not
saying this in order to criticize him (in fact I love his guitar playing myself), but rather to point out what I
have observed. The fact is, Yngwie is very content with his guitar playing, and
his
approach to creating music obviously
works for him. However, if
you find yourself frequently unhappy with the way your guitar solos sound similar to one another then a change needs to be made.
So what is
a good way to solve this issue? Here is one of the methodsfor
creating great guitar solos that
I have found to work with great success.
Take a
listen to all of the singers that you enjoy and choose one. For this
exercise, you are going to compose a guitar solo based on the way your favorite
singer sings his/her melodies. There exist many ways to go about doing this,
and I'm going to outline one of them for you below. I've also provided you with a
video to watch which gives a guitar demonstration of this.
There are 5
steps you need to do:
Step #1: Pick one of the vocal lines that
your chosen singer sings in a song.
Step #2: Using your guitar, play this
melody. Spend some time to really understand how the vocal melody works.
Articulate the specific style that the singer uses as closely as you can (don't
simply 'play the same pitches').
Step #3: Once you can play the melody in a
very articulate manner, pick out the notes which seem to be the strongest
points of the melody. Write this down in some form.
Step #4: Cut out all of the 'non
essential' pitches, leaving
only the most important notes of the melody.
Step #5: Now that you have created a
foundation for your new guitar solo, you can start to get creative. Keep the
main pitches that you've selected, and fill the space in between them with new
guitar licks centered around those notes.
Watch the
video below to see and hear how this all works. Oh, by the way, I brought Fabio
Lione (Rhapsody Of Fire’s singer) all the way from Italy to Chicago to sing the
vocal melody for this 2-hour guitar solo master class (here is a short excerpt
of it).
When you
practice using the information in this article, you will start to develop some
seriously melodic guitar solos. By combining the power of your favorite
singer's vocals with your guitar playing, you can stop making guitar solos that
sound like every other solo, and start making highly unique guitar phrasing
that really stands out.
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