{"id":2935,"date":"2023-07-27T08:46:24","date_gmt":"2023-07-27T08:46:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/?p=2935"},"modified":"2026-01-26T10:35:33","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T10:35:33","slug":"guitar-soloing-intermediate-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/guitar-soloing-intermediate-and-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"Guitar soloing &#8211; Intermediate and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This course was created using Soundslice. Unfortunately Soundslice have recently disabled embedded slices, so if the slices on this page no longer work for you then clicking on the links below each slice will take you to the Soundslice page to view the full layout.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Some Chord Tone Basics<\/strong><br \/>\nLearning music theory and detailed explanations of everything we do is great, and often necessary, but sometimes it&#8217;s also important to just get stuck in and play guitar. This teaches us to listen, train our ears, improve technique and phrasing &#8211; all very important.<br \/>\nThis is often the area where many guitarists get stuck in the so-called &#8220;rut&#8221;. What we need is to learn the difference between merely &#8220;knowing&#8221; a scale and actually &#8220;using&#8221; a scale.<br \/>\nIn this series of workouts we&#8217;re going to do just that. Get stuck in, experiment, practise and improve. The scale is A Natural Minor and we&#8217;re playing over a backing track with a light rock \/ Dire Straits kind of feel.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/SGskc\/embed-channelpost\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"320\" frameBorder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/SGskc\/\">View Part 1 on Soundslice<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Ghost Notes<\/strong><br \/>\nHere we&#8217;ll take a look at using ghost \/ muted notes to create rhythmic phrasing, as often used in funk but also well suited to other styles. This is an important technique to learn even if you do not use it much as it helps massively with improving your timing and feel.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/w9Qkc\/embed-channelpost\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"320\" frameBorder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/w9Qkc\/\">View Part 2 on Soundslice<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Scale Fragments<\/strong><br \/>\nHere we will look at a simple but effective way of learning a scale across the fretboard. Breaking up scales into smaller parts helps us think about them differently and see them for what they are &#8211; just a small selection of notes played in different places.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/TCFkc\/embed-channelpost\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"320\" frameBorder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/TCFkc\/\">View Part 3 on Soundslice<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Experimenting<\/strong><br \/>\nTo improve at anything, we need to experiment. We learn a lot from what we mess around with. Here we&#8217;ll take a look at the types of things you can do to play around with ideas and build better solos.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/6xtkc\/embed-channelpost\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"320\" frameBorder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/6xtkc\/\">View Part 4 on Soundslice<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Bends<\/strong><br \/>\nString bending adds a whole new dimension to your solos. Including string bending with what we have done so far in the previous parts will spice things up further.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/BdSkc\/embed-channelpost\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"320\" frameBorder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/BdSkc\/\">View Part 5 on Soundslice<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Spread the Notes<\/strong><br \/>\nUsing larger intervals to avoid predictable scale-like sounding solos.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/g2f4c\/embed-channelpost\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"320\" frameBorder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/g2f4c\/\">View Part 6 on Soundslice<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Arpeggio Builder<\/strong><br \/>\nIn the previous lessons we have looked at brief ideas of using various scales and arpeggios with short examples of breaking them up and mixing together.<br \/>\nIn this lesson we&#8217;ll do something similar but build up to bigger and more interesting ideas &#8211; but we&#8217;ll take things one step at a time. This should help make things a lot clearer about how I go about building these ideas.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/B4k4c\/embed-channelpost\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"320\" frameBorder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/B4k4c\/\">View Part 7 on Soundslice<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Mixing It Up<\/strong><br \/>\nIn the previous lesson we used mainly arpeggios to work our way around the fretboard. This is a great exercise in learning to use larger intervals and avoid sequential scale note playing. In this lesson we will carry on with the same method of gradually piecing ideas together one step at a time but we&#8217;ll add some scale ideas as well.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/FKy4c\/embed-channelpost\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"320\" frameBorder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/FKy4c\/\">View Part 8 on Soundslice<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Backing Track<\/strong><br \/>\nKey A minor<br \/>\nTempo 135BPM<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/49hkc\/embed-channelpost\/\" width=\"100%\" height=\"320\" frameBorder=\"0\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundslice.com\/slices\/49hkc\/\">View Backing Track Soundslice<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This course was created using Soundslice. Unfortunately Soundslice have recently disabled embedded slices, so if the slices on this page no longer work for you then clicking on the links below each slice will take you to the Soundslice page to view the full layout. Some Chord Tone Basics Learning music theory and detailed explanations &#8230; <a title=\"Guitar soloing &#8211; Intermediate and Beyond\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/guitar-soloing-intermediate-and-beyond\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Guitar soloing &#8211; Intermediate and Beyond\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[52],"class_list":["post-2935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lessons","tag-soloing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2935"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6027,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2935\/revisions\/6027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}