Last time, I talked about how coming up with a great, catchy lick or riff can inspire an entire song. Great riffs have the power to do that, and the best ones do it instantly.
From the Beatles’ I Feel Fine, to the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women, to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, these are all songs that pull the listener in immediately.
A great guitar solo can do the same thing, offering the listener an unexpected journey to a new place before steering the music back to familiar territory. Many players refer to this as the “song within a song” approach to crafting an effective, memorable solo.
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The song we covered last month was Let It Burn, from our 2017 album, Like An Arrow. This song is built from a rock-and-roll-meets-country feel, and the solo needed to stay in that wheelhouse while elevating the music to another level.
Right before the solo, we play a bridge/breakdown lick that serves as a hook of its own. As shown in Figure 1, I arpeggiate the notes of an open G chord into a C chord, followed by a reference to Bb. In bar 4, I incorporate 6th intervals into the phrase. The guitar solo is then played over that lick and similarly blends the sounds of rock and roll and country.
I like to envision my guitar solo as being another voice that’s singing a new melody. To my ears, a melody is a great place to start, as opposed to just a flurry of notes. The solo needs to “sing,” so I thought, “What would I sing over that breakdown lick?” Figure 2 shows the solo.
In bars 1-4, I play a singable melody based on the G minor pentatonic scale (G, Bb, C, D, F), starting with two-note double-stops played 3rds apart. At the end of bar 4 into bar 5, the solo is based on G major pentatonic (G, A, B, D, E), and in bar 6 I play a couple of 6th intervals. The solo then wraps up with a return to G minor pentatonic.
The solo is concise so that it gets out of the way and brings us back to the big chorus, shown in Figure 3 with the ringing C, F/C, G5 chords.
Those initial 3rd intervals work really well over the feel of the breakdown lick underneath. Following the return to the chorus, we reprise the song’s intro lick in order to wrap up the song, with all its elements pulled together in an effective way.
When we play Let It Burn live, I like to stretch out the intro by soloing in this style. Sometimes I stretch it out so much that our bass player will yell, “Hey, start the song!”
Figure 4 offers an example of the types of licks that live in that world where the lines between country music and rock and roll become blurry. In this example, I begin with hybrid-picked double-stops that shift to straight country/blues in bar 3.
There really are countless ways to craft a solo by drawing upon one’s various stylistic influences, so never be afraid to push the envelope in your quest for a captivating and expressive feel and sound.
