Oct 25

Learn To Solo In 5 Minutes - 6 Note Soloing Technique

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Hi, my name is Steve Stine from GuitarZoom.

I have taught literally thousands of beginning guitar players how to play guitar.

And what I wanna do for you is help you with a really awesome trick. To learn how to do some cool soloing, even if you thought that you could never learn how to solo because it just seems so hard.

I'm gonna show you a trick, in literally five minutes. You can start learning how to do some cool little solo features to impress your friends. And do whatever it is you want to do with your band, or whatever it might be.

All you need to know is some open chords. And if you know some open cords, you might know A or D or G or something like that. As long as you know some open chords, you can learn how to do some cool soloing skills with them.

So what I call this is The Six Note Solo Technique, and it works over anything, over any chords, pretty cool.

So what you need to do is, let's just take an easy chord like A.

Let's just take your A open chord for instance.

Okay, what you need to do is you need to be able to find A on the sixth string, okay?

So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you how this works. And then at the end I'm gonna show you what the notes actually are in the six string, you can memorize those if you want to.

But you can also do this by ear.

So what I do is I take my A chord.

I play my lowest note which is the fifth string.

And I find that on the sixth string.

Okay, which is at the fifth fret.

Okay, so when you're on this A chord and you're jamming out and having some fun, doing your thing, what your gonna do is.

You're gonna go to the A on the sixth string, fifth fret, and you're gonna go directly below that onto the fifth string and you're gonna play these six notes.

You're gonna play five, seven.

And you'll notice I'm using my first finger.

And my third finger.

And then you're gonna do the same thing on the next string.

And you're gonna do the same thing on the next string.

And that's it, you're gonna use those three strings that one shape, just...

Okay?

So let me show you kinda what you can do with that.

So I'm playing an A chord, right?

My song is in A or I'm on the A chord and I wanna do something cool, got this A chord playing.

So I come up to those six notes, now the reason I'm playing those six notes is because A is on the fifth fret of the sixth string.

Right here. So I'm going just directly below that onto the fifth string, and that's where this pattern sits right below that.

So here's A, I go down there and here's my notes.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

So I have A, alright so let's listen to what that sounds like.

Okay, so over that chord, over the A chord, now for the rest of your life you'll be able to do this.

Okay so it's not just a beginner thing.

It transfers to anything. It's just a really easy shape for you to memorize because it's just using the first and the third fingers.

And it's just a whole step apart.

So you're just moving from five to seven.

To five to seven, to five to seven, over that A.

Now when you're playing those six notes. The most important note that you wanna try and kind of play more than the others is gonna be on the middle string.

Because you have the fifth string, fourth string and third string.

We wanna be on the fourth string, and it's gonna be where your third finger is, because that note is the root, that note is the A.

So when you're going like this. And you're moving around playing these notes, that note right there is the A that matches that chord.

That's all you have to do, those are the six notes that you play.

When I first start teaching people how to solo it's not that you have to know a bunch of licks.

And things like that, the first thing you need to do is you just need to learn how to, what I call, meander.

Which is just moving around. Playing those notes in different orders, with different rhythms, okay?

It is just the first place to start. And believe me when you get really good at playing guitar and you learn how to solo really well, you're still gonna use this technique.

You're just gonna use lots of other techniques as well.

But movement is something that we need. So it's not like you have to feel like you can't do this because you didn't learn how to do this.

Or you don't know the notes on the guitar.

Or you don't know your theory.

Or you don't know, don't worry about all that stuff.

You'll learn all that, right now the most important thing is you have some fun with this.

So you got your A chord sitting here.

Here's your notes.

And the most important note, the one you wanna target a lot, is that one right there 'cause it's your root.

So you might think, okay well what if I'm on a G chord?

Okay, a G chord.

The root of G, the note G, we're gonna find it on the sixth string again.

Well luckily we're already playing it aren't we, it's the third fret right here.

Okay, so third fret of the sixth string.

All I'm gonna do is drop right below that.

And I'm gonna play that same shape.

And my root again is right here.

Now again, don't worry about speed, and all those kind of things, don't worry about any of that.

Just start exploring those six note by meandering, by moving around, trying some different things.

Remember to play, you know, play loud, play soft, play high, play low, play fast, play slow.

You know, play, don't play.

Always learn how to kind of contrast, right?

So you're not just going, have some fun with it.

You can do all kinds of cool stuff.

So here's the chord right, you might have a buddy playing along with you and you're playing G.

And you go in there and you go.

Notice how I use some repetition there, I'm playing the same note.

Okay, repetition is great. Like playing the note over and over and over or the same pattern, right as you're meandering you might go, oh I like that.

Same, it's three notes out of our six notes right?

Then I start making a pattern out of it, I start going.

Or maybe I change the rhythm of it and go.

See there are so many great things that you can do to start learning how to do basic fundamental soloing.

Even though you don't know all of the other stuff.

And this is something that I've always tried to teach to my beginning students. Is that when you first start learning how to play, don't feel like you can't have some fun with these things.

Because you're not far enough along in your guitar playing or whatever that stuff is, don't worry about any of that.

You gotta learn to have some fun, and you gotta learn to start thinking about rhythms right?

You gotta start learning how to pick single notes.

Right at first playing these single strings is kinda weird and takes a little bit of time.

So that's how we do this on any chord.

So let's say I went to a D chord right?

I got a D chord.

Well now I gotta find D on the sixth string.

So I think about my lowest note of D chord I would strum four strings.

So I'm gonna pluck that fourth string there.

So that's at the tenth fret, so D's at the tenth fret.

So over this D chord, I come up here, and boom I got my six notes again.

Same shape, that's the beauty of guitar is everything is movable?

It's a system, no matter where you go, you can do the same thing as long as you move it to the correct place.

Okay, so that's the first step for you.

You don't have to know all twelve notes on the six string and all that sort of thing in the beginning.

Eventually you're gonna know all that.

But to begin with, start with just a couple of chords, you know, just get used to A for instance.

Because you probably know how to play an A chord.

And if you don't obviously you should learn how to play that because it's pretty important.

But you'll learn A, and you'll learn that A is at the fifth fret, okay?

A is really important to guitar players.

So once you make a correlation in your head between the A chord, and going to the fifth fret. And then finding your six notes and exploring, just do that for a while.

That way whenever an A chord comes up for the rest of your life, you'll have that little position that you can go to.

Whether you're playing acoustic or electric it doesn't make any difference?

Then once you get comfortable with that, then maybe try G, go to the third fret and do the same thing.

Now it is the same thing no matter where you go on the guitar. But that doesn't mean that it can't get confusing if you don't know where you're going.

That's why what I want you to do is think about taking it slow, right?

Learn A, go to the fifth fret, and explore that, just A.

Just have your buddy or if you can record yourself playing, just play an A chord.

And then just play that little spot.

Over and over and over just to get comfortable with that.

Once you've got A and it's feeling pretty good, then try G, go to the third fret, try G.

Once you get comfortable with that, go to D which is at the tenth fret, and try that.

Okay, another one that would be really good for you to do is C if you know how to play a C chord.

Whether it's a C add nine a lot of people call this, or a regular C like this, again whatever works for ya.

I don't care about the shape of the chord, whatever you're doing, even if it's an easy C, okay?

But C is located at the eighth fret of the sixth string.

So again you just drop directly underneath it, and you play those six notes.

And you do that over your C chord.

Over that C chord, okay?

So that's the first step. Just being able to understand that when you're on a chord, you can move to the right position. And we're gonna give you a little chart that shows the notes of the sixth string,?

So I don't confuse you even more, you can just use that chart for now. If you don't know the notes on your sixth string, you can go, okay I need A it's at the fifth fret.

That little chart is gonna tell you that.

Or I need G, oh I need to go to the third fret, that's where that little chart is.

So we're gonna include that as well for you to use to figure out how this goes.

Now the next question is, what if you have a bunch of chords, right?

What if you're playing A, G, and D all in one chord progression which obviously happens in music, right?

So you might be going like this.

And you might be playing like three different chords together, A and D and G, over and over and over, okay?

So the trick here is we have to try and either, number one, move with each chord as it happens. Which can be kinda confusing 'cause if the chords are moving fast, that's pretty tough.

If the chords are moving nice and slow and you got a lot of time, that's okay.

Like you could be playing A.

And that would be okay, you could do that.

I refer to that as chord chasing. You're chasing the chord around the guitar so every time the chord changes, you switch to a different spot.

But as you get better at this, what you do is you start using your ear to decide.

Maybe I'll just stay in one of those spots, right?

But the trick to that is you have to figure out which one of these chords between the A that I'm playing. The D that I'm playing, the G that I'm playing, which one feels like it's the main chord?

Okay, which one am I spending more time on, which one am I playing at the beginning and end of my song?

Or the beginning and end of that section, or you know, which one is being played more often, whatever it might be.

And again that's not always the right answer, but it's a good place to start just to have some fun, right?

You don't have to worry about, it's not like if you don't know, you know, 17 times 58 off the top of your head you can't do math.

Of course you can, you can still explore things on a lesser level and that's what I want you to understand here.

So let's say we took the A, the D, the G, and then the A that I'm playing.

And I'm deciding that A is kinda the most important chord of those three right?

So it's moving around.

So what I do then is I go in there, and I'm gonna decide to just stay in A this time, instead of chord chasing, I'm gonna just stay here.

And I'm gonna play, so here's my A.

Here comes D.

G.

A, and it sounds awesome, sounds just fine right?

So you could learn to just stay in one place, now could you try D, sure you could.

Could you try G, of course you could.

You can explore all of these things because the point of this is to have fun and to make music.

If music always made sense, we would not have rock and roll.

We just wouldn't, there's a lot of things about rock music that just doesn't make any sense but you know what?

It doesn't make any difference because it sounds great, and that's really the point.

So that's what I want you to explore.

I want you to think about learning the notes on the six string and again using our chart.

Where if you don't wanna memorize them, you can at least look at the chart to figure out where it is.

You start with just one chord and learn how to mess around.

With that one chord in the right position, then try another chord, then try another chord.

And then after a while you'll get really comfortable with knowing where they are.

Then maybe you put a couple of chords together, you start trying to move from A to D.

So you're moving from here fifth fret up to the tenth fret.

You're just exploring that a little bit, and remember I call that chord chasing.

Just moving around following those chords.

If the chords are moving too fast, if I'm going, you're not gonna.

You're not gonna do that, that sounds crazy.

That's when you start just taking all the chords and putting them together and go. You know what, instead of chord chasing, I'm just gonna stay in one spot.

And I'm gonna start making something.

And the easiest way to do that is just to make a choice.

Which chord out of those chords that you're playing seems like it's the main chord?

Don't worry about key signature, and how many sharps and flats.

Don't worry about any of that right now.

Just have some fun and use your ear, okay?

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And we talk about guitar and guitar related stuff all the time.

Keep it very fun, we keep it really positive.

You know, we're not there to judge where you're at in your path.

Everybody's somewhere right?

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In learning chords or scales or rhythm or theory, or any kind of thing that you might be interested in.

So again, thank you for checking out this video and your time and welcome to the GuitarZoom family.