Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.
I used my Schecter for all my rhythms and most of my solos, certainly the fast solos.
In the '90s, guitar solos were dead.
It's quite similar to guitar solos, only with programming you have to use your brain. The most important thing is that it should have some emotional effect on me, rather than just, 'Oh, that's really clever.'
I don't really break into too many solos. But I've never been a super-big solo guy anyway. I like to make the main melody guitar lines of the songs as cool and interesting as possible without just strumming chords. I like to have chords intertwined with riffs here and there, but I'll do the riffs and the solos where the bottom will drop out. Basically, I do everything for the song, I don't do it for the solo glory. Kids aren't really into that anymore for some reason.
Listening to as many guitar solos as possible is the best method for someone in the early stages. But saxophone solos can be helpful. They're interesting because they are all single notes, and therefore can be repeated on the guitar. If you can copy a sax solo you're playing very well, because the average saxophonist can play much better than the average guitarist.
My main objective with a home studio - I could get into doing full band demos - but my first objective is to cut things like guitar tracks and solos at home.
I love all my guitar solos.
I do media every day I tour and the travel itself is a bit testing, so I don't get to do much gregarious activity when I'm on the road, but I do enough barbequing and enough hanging out and training with enough law enforcement and military to keep me bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and to make sure my guitar solos every night breath fire.
On 'Metallica,' I recorded six or seven different guitar solos for almost every song, took the best aspects of each solo, mapped out a master solo and made a composite. Then I learned how to play the composite solo, tightened it up and replayed it for the final version.
Barney Kessel was 'Mr. Guitar,' the foremost jazz guitarist of his generation. He had an amazing imagination, his solos were incredible, he swung his tail off, he was a heck of an arranger and could out-read anybody.
I would just like to say that Ritchie Blackmore did a bunch of great stuff guitar - wise. I'm happy to play the solo from 'Highway Star'. I always thought it was one of the most exciting guitar solos I'd ever played.
With my first high school band ever, we would have these breaks in the song for idiotic solos, solos that were un-tasteful and would be shredding, but I needed to put them in there, and I realize now it's because we were playing shows with a whole bunch of bands that were all male.
I actually had a really nice guitar as a teenager. I took jazz guitar, so my mom bought me this probably $1,600 guitar. But I got really into garage rock and local bands, and I noticed they played really crappy guitars. So I thought, 'Hey, I should get a crappy guitar, too!'
Not that I play guitar anywhere near as well as she sings, but I think I have always had a tendency to play solos the same way, in emotional relation to the structure of the song. I choose simple lines, and only play what seems emotionally relevant, and often express that emotion in time, that is in play or resistance to the set time of the song.
I'm sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be doing classic guitar solos on YouTube.
I have them a few minutes to absorb everything while I teased Ubie, who only had to recover from his near-death experience. I was so glad Reyes hadn't ripped him to shreds. I liked him much better un-shredded. Unlike, say, my preference for lettuce or heavy metal guitar solos.
Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn't get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.
A gut-string classical Spanish guitar, a sweet, lovely little lady. The smell of it. Even now, to open a guitar case, when it's an old wooden guitar, I could crawl in and close the lid.
I'll get up there and I'll do my guitar solos in one of those space outfits.
It's a magical thing, the guitar. It allows you to be the whole band in one, to play rhythm and melody, sing over the top. And as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes, draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which even a piano can't do.
Basically, I try to treat the electric guitar like an acoustic guitar. What you have to do is attack the instrument and know that your feelings aren't controlled by the controls of your guitar.
All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.
I was learning guitar as the band was beginning, at least in terms of being a lead guitar player. I could write songs, but I couldn't really play solos.
I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.
Every girl is a singer. I wanted to learn the solos and play lead guitar. I would meticulously teach myself solos so when dudes were like, 'Oh, you're a girl, you can't play guitar,' I could rip these insane Telecaster blues solos and tell them, 'Yeah, I can burn up a fret board.'
The gut-strung guitar, the classical guitar, that is a whole different world on its own. When you think what the guitar can do and what every individual player does with a guitar, everyone has their own identity coming through the guitar.
I don't labour over my lead guitar solos; they're better just caught in the moment.
When I started doing sessions, the guitar was in vogue. I was playing solos every day.
Anytime you go to see a band with a guitar player, there's always a fear of guitar overkill! That's a funny question. If you went to a Taylor Swift concert or a Jay-Z show, people would think, 'Oh, my God, I hope I don't get guitar overkill.' People come to our show for guitar, and there can never be enough.
The only thing I don't write is the guitar solos, but even then I might suggest one or two things.
A guitar solo in the same part of every tune - that's been done so much. I think solos shine more when you have them in specific and unexpected places.
I got home, picked up my ax, turned on the four-track and just played it ... I played three solos back to back on Cemetery Gates ... the next morning, the second and third solos weren't bad, but the first had that first take magic ! .. I didn't touch it.
Our music is an answer to the early Seventies when artsy people with big egos would do vocal harmonies and play long guitar solos and get called geniuses.
And I've also come to the conclusion that, as far as guitar solos and things like that are concerned, it's more important to complement the music rather than take away from it.
I got a toy guitar at a fundraiser and was trying to write songs with it that were ridiculous. After a week, my parents bought me a real acoustic guitar, and I started taking guitar lessons.
I can't use logic concerning my feelings, my feelings demand musical notes, violins, guitar solos, the stomping of feet, poetic language, metaphors, poetic lines about birds or deserts or tree-crowded forests.
The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.
I'm a guitar player. I've carved out my own style of guitar music, so I don't look for inspiration with playing guitar.
I write most of my songs to beats. I play around on guitar, but not enough to where I can compose my own stuff or play solos. I can accompany myself 'cause most songs are, like, four chords.
After months of playing air guitar to 'Free Bird', what really got me into guitar was watching a documentary about Jimi Hendrix and picking up the Woodstock soundtrack. Listening to his version of 'Star Spangled Banner' and 'Purple Haze.' My brother played acoustic guitar and, idolising him, I thought, 'I'm going to get a guitar.'
My D'Angelico is a jazz archtop guitar. That guitar was made for Glenn Miller's guitar player in 1939. It's a '39 D'Angelico New Yorker.
I was pillaging a lot of music that had nothing to do with guitar playing, using a lot of strange tunings and voicings and chord structures that aren't really that natural to the guitar; I ended up developing a harmonic palette that's not particularly natural to the guitar because I was always trying to make my guitar sound like something else.
Most people can do what I do - they can do guitar solos - but they can't do a good, hard rhythm guitar and be dedicated to it.
Guitar solos bore the hell out of me. Only a few guitarists interest me, and it's not about the solos they play, it's about the grooves they create.
I don't like guitar solos that are like, 'Look at me, look at me!' I like guitar solos that are little songs within the songs.
I would have to say I'm bored with the standard rock, guitar solos, but I've done it for five albums now, and this time I wanted to go in a completely different direction. I wasn't interested in showing off any more.
In high school, I decided I wanted to learn guitar, so I picked it up and starting teaching myself some basic chords and started playing with friends. Guitar inherently lends itself to be guitar music, especially when you're not good at guitar.
I can't draw. But I can draw with sound. That's the most useful thing I learned in terms of what my craft is... The arrangements were mine. They were little lines and stuff that I had written myself... And I was locked into this idea that vocals didn't count, melodies didn't count, songwriting craftsmanship didn't count. The only thing that counted was high arching guitar solos...
Punk came along and grunge made guitar solos uncool.
I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.
When I was 13, I got my first guitar, and I could sort of play Ted Nugent songs, but I couldn't play the solos. But I could play along with entire Ramones songs.
There are two types of session guitar players. One reads and only plays what the 'dots' say. The other adds that something special and plays notes and solos you dream of. Big Jim Sullivan was such a player.
We're losing the whole point: music is not to impress people, music has to stand up on its own and guitar solos are nothing to do with it.
That solo on "Lord, I'm Discouraged" in terms of notes it isn't anything like it, but in terms of aesthetic, it's direct rip-off from the "November Rain" solo. In fact, when I did it, I imagined myself walking out of a church, walking out onto a cliff and doing a guitar solo. Slash has always been one of my favorites because the guy uses a lot of melody in his solos.
Guitar solos, to me, should be a really articulate way to make fun of guitar solos.
From now on all of my guitar solos will be in morse code.
If you have a great-sounding guitar that's a quality instrument and a good amp, and you know how to make the guitar talk, that's the key. It starts with the guitar and knowing what it should sound and feel like.
It really shocked me just to hear of the fans' response to 'St. Anger' not having guitar solos.
I was doing someones hair the day I first saw my guitar ... a guy was walking down the street with it, and knew that guitar was mine (a 1953 weathered Fender Telecaster) .. I said I'll get you the most beautiful guitar you've ever seen and I'll trade you straight across ... I found him a purple Telecaster and said here's your guitar ... that was it, it was like he knew that guitar belonged to me.
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