A Few Extra Licks and Tricks for Building a Cool Guitar Solo

PREFACE

If you are a beginner guitar player that just learned a few things like picking, string bending, playing harmonics, vibrato... and off cause you want to show off your skills to your friends or maybe your chick, but the most solos out there are still too difficult for you and you don't feel like sitting for hours on exercising, this page is for you!

I'll show you how how to do it right now.

First of all, most of the time lead guitar sounds much cooler with accompaniment. Here is the jam track I've used in the demo:

I've purposely made it so short to save you from the stupid situations like forgetting something while playing, running out of ideas, or getting tired. :)

This track consists of a very simple power chord progression that will be appropriate for almost any guitar solo:

Now I'll give you a few tried and tested cool sounding guitar licks and tricks. Mix, combine, extend upon them if you wish following your own feelings, while playing along with the jam track and you'll soon hear how cool is the guitar solo that comes out of your amp.

The Intro Lick

This lick sounds especially impressive in the beginning of the jam track, right after the hi hat intro beats.

The note on the bending string is an artificial harmonic, if you haven't performed artificial harmonics yet, play it as a plain note instead.

When I slowly release the bend (the BD in the tab stays for bend down) I pick the string a number of times.

The last note at the 5th fret is a natural harmonic, I make a dip with the vibrato arm and continue using it to vibrate the note.

Cool Lead Guitar Cliché

The first note of the pattern is stroked by the pick downwards; the second and third are played only with the fretting hand by hammer on and pull off technique; the last, forth note is stroked by the pick, this time upwards; after the stroking I perform a full string bend and play the same pattern again and again for a few times.

Easy to play nice phrase

Only each note at the 20th fret is stroked with the plectrum. The rest is played using the legato - hammer on and pull off technique, this makes performing this lick quickly dramatically easier.

On the last note I bend the string up for one tone and vibrate it with the whammy bar.

Hammer on / pull off fast rising

Here again, using the legato technique in lieu of string picking with majority of the notes allows to play this fast passage without having a lot of guitar practice under your belt.

Only each first note on every string and the last one are stroked by the pick.

A Blend of Artificial Harmonics and bends

A Trill and Impressive artificial harmonic on lower string

After the trill, I stike an artificial harmonic at the 5th fret on the 5th string and make a full tone bend. Playing harmonics on the lower strings and bending them sounds cool in its own way!