By Raj Jayavant · Updated
The most common reason people abandon a solo is that they chose one two or three years beyond their current playing. Ambition is not the problem, timescale is: a solo that takes six months of daily work will be dropped in week three.
A good target is one where you can already play perhaps half the phrases at tempo, and the rest are recognisably difficult rather than impossible. You want a solo with two or three hard spots, not twenty.
Play the solo through several times without your instrument. You are listening for structure: where the phrases begin and end, which ideas repeat, where the player breathes. Most solos are far more repetitive than they sound, and spotting that early can halve the amount you actually have to learn.
If you can hum the solo from memory, learning it on the instrument becomes a matter of finding notes you already know rather than discovering them one at a time.
Bars are a notation convenience. Phrases are how the music is actually built, and how your memory will store it. A phrase is usually two to four bars: a musical sentence with a beginning and an end.
Work on one phrase at a time and finish it before moving on. Learning the whole solo badly is slower than learning a third of it properly, because everything you play badly has to be unlearned later.
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that does the work. Take the phrase and slow it to the point where you can play it accurately with no hesitation. For most players and most solos that is somewhere around half speed, and for a genuinely fast run it can be slower still.
Playing it slowly is not a lesser version of playing it fast. It is how the movement gets encoded. If you cannot play it cleanly slowly, you cannot play it cleanly quickly, you can only play it quickly and approximately.
This is what PhraseLoop was built for: mark the start and end of the phrase, drop the speed as far as you need, and it repeats on its own so you can keep both hands on the guitar. Point it at whatever video or recording you are learning from.
Once the phrase is clean three times in a row, raise the speed a little. Ten percent is a sensible step. Play it again until it is clean three times, then raise it again.
When a step goes wrong, go back one level rather than pushing through. Practicing a phrase you cannot yet play at that tempo teaches your hands to make the mistake reliably. There is more on the mechanics of this in how to practice slowly and speed up.
Learning phrases separately creates a specific problem: the joins. You can play phrase one and phrase two, and fall apart in the half second between them.
Fix it by practicing the join itself. Loop from the last two notes of one phrase into the first two of the next, and nothing else. It feels absurdly narrow, and it is much faster than running the whole solo and hoping.
When the solo is comfortable at tempo, spend a few minutes above it. Coming back to the original speed afterwards buys you headroom, and a solo that feels slightly easy is one you can still play when you are nervous or the drummer rushes.
A moderately difficult solo, worked this way for twenty minutes a day, usually comes together in one to two weeks. The first two days feel slow because you are working on small fragments and have nothing that sounds like the solo yet. That is the method working, not failing.