The Most EXPRESSIVE Guitar Players All Do THIS
Do you wish your guitar solos sounded more expressive and emotional, like your favourite guitar players?
Is there a secret to what makes the best solos as good as they are?
Let's be real: there is not one secret. There’s actually many factors, as you might be able to imagine.
But if I was writing some clickbait email, I would tell you that there is One Secret (tm) and that in the whole universe the sole person that can give it to you is me. (... I would not ask your firstborn in payment because, frankly, I already have enough kids of my own they are adorable, but enough is enough.)
Luckily for you, I am not writing clickbait emails today (but maybe tomorrow?...)
That said, there is one massive component to these great solos that you can incorporate immediately and will make quite a bit of difference. To explain that, I need your collaboration for a minute:
I want you to think about the absolute best, most expressive, most emotional guitar solo you’ve ever heard.
Maybe it’s David Gilmour, Brian May, Slash, who knows. Think about your answer, then pull up the song and listen to the solo.
Now, as you listen to the solo:
I want you to slowly exhale whenever you hear notes being played by the guitar.
Whenever there are no notes being played, inhale. Do this for the entire solo.
Once you’ve reached the end of the solo, ask yourself this question: are you dead?
Chances are, the answer is no. (And if the answer is yes, at least you can't reply to this email in anger about my gross mistake here...)
...and the reason for this is that the most expressive, emotional guitar solos always have space. Space in which you can breathe.
And we are conditioned to like hearing space in melodies not just because it gives us time to digest what we’ve heard, but also because the most common instrument that we hear melodies from is the human voice. Which, unsurprisingly enough, is powered by air.
This means that we tend to like melodies that sound like they could be sung.
So, how do we become better at improvising ‘singable’ melodies? Watch the video linked below, and I’ll explain a couple of simple tricks you can start using right away.
As I said previously, there are a lot of factors that make for good guitar solos. Another thing that will be a massive help is understanding scales and modes. If you want to develop a complete understanding of scales and modes, check out my Master of the Modes guitar course
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you. Let's say you want to improvise an expressive guitar solo. Now, if you are like most guitar players, and if you are like me years ago, okay? One thing you do is that you just start, improvise something, put a lick you know, improvise something else, put another lick you know, but that doesn't really create an expressive emotional guitar solo.
Turns out though, that creating an expressive emotional guitar solo, it's not as hard, okay? You just need, and again, I know this sounds like clickbait, but you just need one weird trick. One simple weird trick.
I'm gonna explain to you this trick. It looks really simple, and it looks strange actually, how much this trick makes a difference until you try it. Indeed, to keep myself honest, I'm not even gonna show you on myself.
I'm not gonna do the examples. I'm gonna show you when I explain this to a student, and I'm gonna show you the before and after of the student, and you can tell me, because the only thing I told this student is think about this one weird trick, and make your solo breathe, okay?
Let's go and see the trick. Something I find myself thinking a lot about, what's the next chord, you know? Even if I know what notes are in the chord, I find myself just having to search around, and I lose the concentration.
I lose the flow. What's a chord progression you've improvised on recently, or you're familiar with? There's one that goes D minor, D minor, B flat, G minor. Okay, I see that. I'm playing D minor, D minor, B flat, G minor, and then you play whatever you want.
So I'm gonna go at this speed. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I will start this way, you're playing a lot of notes. Either you're fishing for the right note, or you're just moving around until you find the right note, or you simply are playing too much.
And again, I don't want to dictate how much you play, but there was no breathing in your playing. Because there was no notes, notes, notes, notes, notes. So let's start. Before we go on everything about what notes to hit, etc, etc, let's put some breathing into your playing.
Imagine you are a trumpet player or a clarinet player, okay? When you play, you're gonna run progressively out of breath. When you get to the end, you need to take a breath, okay? So now, you're gonna improvise and you're gonna go...
When you play. Once you cannot take it anymore and take a breath, stop playing. So just simulate having to blow into an instrument, okay? Okay, let's try that. Makes sense. Now, attention. That doesn't mean you cannot play fast.
It just means you cannot play fast for a long time. Right. Because you're gonna run out of breath. So, before you had some good licks with some fast movement, do that, but keep on with the idea of breathing.
Don't forget to breathe. So the first thing you need to have is this idea of not playing all the time, okay, because there is also a side effect. Now you're thinking about breathing, leaving space, etc.
You are kind of forced to use your inner ear to understand what you're doing. You cannot just let the hands go. You're kind of forced to think, do I finish this phrase? Where do I finish this phrase?
How do I finish this phrase? What do I do once I finish this phrase? Or kind of this kind of thing. You see that this was sounding better than before. I don't know, this is with respect to your normal playing, but okay, you are starting to think about all that.
That's the first thing. The next step would be that you actually sing what you're playing when you're playing it. Now, the slow stuff, it's easy to sing. The fast stuff, you just go, okay, you just pretend, but you know where you're going.
So whenever you're playing, I'm not that way for me. Okay, so you just connect your voice to what you're playing as an exercise. Just play and sing at the same time. Good. This is the best way to express yourself because it goes beyond all the considerations like what are the chord notes, what is the right point in the bar, where do I stop the...
You are now using your full mental, full musical intelligence, your full musical instinct to create the solo. You can keep studying your theory, you can keep doing your ear training, etc., but for improvisation, connect your voice to your guitar.
And don't forget to breathe, okay? That's vital. Now, if you choose to write a piece where you don't breathe, that's okay. There's plenty of pieces where the guitar goes on and on and on and they sound beautiful.
But it must be a conscious choice that you're doing. Okay? In this part, I'm just having this barrage of notes, no breathing from beginning to end, because I want more intensity. It has to be a conscious choice, not just what happens.
Do those two things, the breathing and the singing, and you'll see that it's gonna be easier and easier to express yourself, because you are actually connecting with the instrument, not just fiddling with your fingers.
Make sense? Yeah. Good. Do that. Cool. Thank you. Thank you, Carlos. Great playing.