By now, perhaps you are coming along well with the exercises. But you may wonder how on earth do you apply technique to soloing? This is a difficult question and is similar to the equally difficult question, "How do you play lead"? There are no strict answers to these types of questions. Some people prefer to learn a handful of riffs, and then their playing becomes dominated by their riffs. I prefer to view solos like vocal sections. Whether it is a solo, or a melody, I feel that something is always being communicated, and what better way to communicate than treating your guitar like a voice. So when I write solos, they usually are inspired by a melody and are dominated by the melody. A solo may have several main parts, and technique comes into the picture when I try to connect the parts meaningfully.
The exercises that follow show riffs from a few songs I recorded (some in dire need of a re-recording!). In the included audio files, you will notice that you don't hear the riff until several seconds after you start playing the file. I did this so that you can hear the musical context of the riff (i.e. what led up to it).
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It has been a while since I used one of my own songs as material for a guitar lesson. And so I have gone through some of my songs to find examples of technique being used as the basis for a melodic riff or phrasing. Since so many of the guitar lessons on my site are rather challenging, I wanted to provide a guitar lesson that is much more easily digestable, but at the same time being challenging enough to make it worth your while. And so I settled on a riff that exhibits good use of legato (i.e. hammer ons and pull offs).
Above you see the tab for the riff. I am by no means a skilled transcriber and so the above tab is just a general representation. The notes are pretty much note for note, but you will just need to listen to the audio clip to get a better feel for the execution.
The toughest part of this riff is the rapid position shifting. I find riffs tht cover a wide range on the neck to generally be very interesting sounding and I think you will agree that this riff has a certain appeal.
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