I've never really spent much time learning solos, I've always tended to play enouogh to get the basic style, shape, learn a few interesting runs etc. Also my reading ability is pretty good, so give me a proper Note/Tab of say the solo to Mr Brownstone by guns n roses and after a couple of goes I can simply read it.
For my own stuff I've tended to build solos into a finished article over time, so it's never been an issue.
now I'm presented with an interesting covers band opportunity and they want note for note solos. Sweet Child o mine is one of the songs, it's a pretty long solo. I can play it no problem, but learning it....
Any tips?
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Often a long solo is marked by a mix of improv and key phrases.
So, if you take CNumb as everyone knows it, David pretty much always plays the first 12 bars of the outro as per the recording.
He then has, say around 10 or 15 'key phrases' that are a couple of bars long and tend to be used ad hoc.
So, my approach is to nail the bits played by rote, then learn a load of key phrases which allude to the ones he uses.
I think a degree of artistic licence with a solo THIS long is also allowable, as long as you sort of pay homage to those key phrases.
Another couple I've done exactly like this- Free Bird, December (All About Eve) and Fingers of Love (Crowded House).
If you want the idiot's guide to every CNumb phrase ever, here' the famous Oslo gig, where DG spent all day getting shitfaced with David Crosby, walked on stage and just said fuck it...and the results, as you can hear, are utterly astonishing
*An Official Foo-Approved guitarist since Sept 2023.
I just played something broadly similar for the final (E harmonic minor) solo. Although I did go to some trouble to nail the ascending lick.
I think the important thing is to capture the main parts that people expect to hear. I'm not sure that Slash would play it exactly the same every time.
Note: we didn't tune down a semitone, which is why I refer to it being in E harmonic minor at the end.
Two of my best mates in music are Dave Fowler and Steve McElroy from The Aussie Floyd Show (Dave's rig was at least 50% mine at one point- certainly his P1, P2, MXR Dyna (1976) and his 1970 JBL Speakered Twin, and Steve owns my Dynacord CLS222 and my Motion Sound Rotary Speakers.)
They tell horror stories of Floyd anoraks (not me) who sit with notebooks in the Audience and if one single note is varied, SMac says you can see them get their pencils out, make a note and then bombard the website the following day.
I will admit, SMac has employed me to ear-test a show on 2 occasions, and the only thing we disagreed on was SOYCD, as SMac uses two compressors, as per the album version, and I prefer the PULSE version.
*An Official Foo-Approved guitarist since Sept 2023.
Part of the reason is the segue to the videos. Only 3 tracks are totally free styled- CNumb being one.
*An Official Foo-Approved guitarist since Sept 2023.
*An Official Foo-Approved guitarist since Sept 2023.
Otherwise tribute bands should sound like the people they are selling themselves as, that's why your audience is there surely?
Long solos I break down into the constituent phrases and learn each one before tacking the next one or two onto that, gradually building the length and speed as I go Having got it down I might then 'cheat' or rephrase a couple of notes to make it smoother for my hands without it sounding different to average Joe. But the original part is my starting point. If people wanted to hear me they can come see me play originals, but you know what, there's no money for me in that.
I like it when I'm given the task to learn something in a new style, it opens new horizons in my playing which I might never have tackled. Go from Nile Rodgers to Peter Frampton, Mark Knophler to Eric Clapton, Unknown Latin rhythm player to George Benson.
I've just been tasked with an accurate version of Street Life, now there is more than one guitar part in places so it will be a fudge, the trick is to make it not sound like one and disappear into the mix where appropriate.
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The quickest way and best way, for me, by far is to load the mp3 into a program called Transcribe! which will display the song as a wave on the screen. Then map the song with section markers and bar markers -- which you can do as fast as you listen through the song. Once the song is mapped you can then SEE how many bars the section is and you can learn it bar by bar or whatever way you want. It's so much easier to see you've got say 24 bars to learn, and two of them are buggers but the rest are okay.
You can also slow things down and repeat difficult bars, etc. E.g. the tricky two bar lick in Sweet Child O Mine.
Looks like this: (and the +1 is to bring SCOM from flat tuning into standard -- i.e. changing key, and adjusting for random tunings, Jimi I'm looking at you, is simple).
Yes I use a broadly similar (but not quite so detailed) approach with Transcribe! for audio files. I tend to use Transcribe! instead of Reaper (which can also do something similar), because the Transcribe! interface seems ideally tailored to this purpose.
With Youtube video clips I sometimes download them using the Video DowloadHelper addin for Firefox. Then I drag the downloaded video file into Reaper. This allows slowed down video/audio with the option of preserving the pitch.