Lessons – Guitar Chords Blog

Guitar Soloing – The Problem With Scales Part 3 – Minor Blues

Blues chords and scales This is a slightly confusing topic, and one that tends to contradict a lot of what we learn in common music theory. The best thing to do with blues is to not try correlating it with typical music theory – just learn the basic ideas and think of it simply as … Read more

Guitar Soloing – The Problem With Scales Part 4 – Major Blues

Scales and Major Blues If you regularly visit guitar forums and social media posts, information on scales to use over major blues chord progressions often ends up confusing and, quite frankly, is often wrong. That’s not to say the subject isn’t slightly complicated but that comes more from trying to relate things to traditional music … Read more

Guitar Soloing – The Problem With Scales Part 2 – Chord Tones

Targeting Chord Tones Depending on the style of music, using a scale to create a solo is as much about the chords as it is the scale. Something like a typical blues solo will often be based mostly around the minor pentatonic scale combined with cliche licks and other commonly used ideas. Other music may … Read more

Guitar Soloing – The Problem With Scales and How to Use Them

My guitar solos suck! What scales should I use? It’s a question we hear often among amateur and even some advanced intermediate guitarists. The title sentence reads like a statement followed by a question – in actual fact it’s more like a question followed by the answer. Let’s rewrite it: Q: Why do my guitar … Read more

Guitar soloing – Intermediate and Beyond

This course was created using Soundslice. I have put them all together on this page to make it easier to find all eight parts. Clicking on “View Full Version” for each slice will be taken to the Soundslice page to view the full layout. If you aren’t familiar with Soundslice then simply click on the … Read more

Rock & Roll Guitar Soloing – Part 2

In the previous section we looked at the idea of playing rock & roll solos by taking a common riff, adding a few notes to it and playing them as single notes or double stops while moving them along the neck to play over each chord change. In this section we’ll take a look at a few more ideas we can use to spice things up a bit and then put them together to create a solo.

Rock & Roll Guitar Soloing – Part 1

Sometimes we can get too caught up worrying about scales when it comes to guitar soloing. Nothing wrong with scales, they play an important role when it comes to soloing, however, for some styles of music it’s perfectly OK to forget all about scale thinking and just concentrate on what works with the chords. Rock & Roll and many styles of blues (particularly major blues) will often be taught explaining scales, Mixolydian modes, arpeggios or mixing major and minor pentatonics and so on. Theoretically this is all true. Good to know if you’re into that sort of thing – but knowing and understanding it isn’t always a necessity. Whether it’s Chuck Berry, Beach Boys, Rockabilly or up tempo blues – for the sake of this lesson let’s just throw away traditional scale teaching and try something else – we’ll just call it “chord stuff”.

CAGED System and Chord Tone Soloing – Part 3

I was going to start this part of the series with some chord tone exercises. Instead, I’m going to sidetrack a bit first and explain a few things about scales and guitar solos. This won’t be in depth, just an outline of things you should realise which will hopefully make you think a little differently about scales.

CAGED System and Chord Tone Soloing – Part 4

CAGED and chord tone exercises

Part 4 is going to be a boring but essential set of exercises. That doesn’t mean you can’t make them interesting.

We’re going to jump straight in here with chord tone exercises and maybe mix in some scale ideas. I’ll keep details fairly brief so if something is bugging you or leaving you confused, just reply in the comments and ask whatever you like.

CAGED System and Chord Tone Soloing – Part 5

In the previous chapters of this series we have mostly concentrated on using nothing but chord tones, with the exception of some leading tones to spice things up a bit. The main purpose of working with these ideas is to get yourself familiar with, and being able, to find chord tones quickly.