Create Expressive Solo Guitar Parts

Before you picked up a guitar for the first time, you probably had an idea in your mind of the kind of guitar sound that appealed to you and the kinds of situation in which you might want to play.

For many of us, the idea of picking up the guitar and being able to play music that sounds great to us is a very important part of why we wanted to learn to play in the first place.

It’s easy to get into learning a lot of vocabulary and a lot of material - but that won’t necessarily of itself make you sound better or allow you to enjoy your playing more.

As well as vocabulary, to feel that you’re actively determining what you’re playing, (rather than just doing your best to correctly play things you have memorised) you need creative approaches to help you make decisions about how to combine the techniques and material you know.

This material gives you concepts you can apply to any chord progression that you may be playing solo (or even in a jam situation) and have multiple ways of playing it, and multiple approaches for developing your arrangements.

Even if you are a beginning guitarist, you can apply these ideas and at least some of the actual examples we’ll see below. The more your technique develops, the more ways you’ll have of being able to apply the ideas to the fretboard.

Contrast / Continuity

This is the idea that is at the heart of the approaches we’ll explore. For us and for anyone hearing us to enjoy the music, we need enough contrast and development for it to be interesting, and enough continuity for it to be coherent.

Imagine having a conversation with someone and they keep telling you the same thing. You are going to get bored quite quickly. There is not enough contrast.

But if they tell you about a great film they saw at the weekend, and then they start talking immediately about a trip they took three years ago; now it becomes hard to follow - there is too much contrast. In both cases the conversation is not very satisfying.

When we are playing guitar solo, there are some elements of contrast that are not available to us. We cannot, for example, contrast the sound of the guitar with the sound of another instrument.

We cannot contrast the volume of the guitar with the volume of multiple instruments playing at the same time. But there are many, many things available to us that we can contrast, to excellent musical effect.