Guitar Solos
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Introduction
The term guitar solo conjures up evocative images in the minds of many people. For some it is the sight of the god like guitar hero wringing pure emotion from his tortured axe. For others it is the sight of some wally with a perm and spandex trousers creating the sound of someone wringing a goose’s neck, whilst pulling silly faces.
Confusingly enough a guitar solo is rarely undertaken solo and is usually accompanied by other musicians. It refers to a point in a piece of music where the guitar moves from its home in the rhythm section into the lead section, hence the term lead break is more often more accurately used. During a guitar solo the other instruments are secondary and the guitar maintains melodic interest. Guitar solos are often improvised and vary from a few terse musical phrases designed to compliment a song to self indulgent showboating lasting up to an hour. Debate has raged for many years as to which point between these two extremes constitutes a good guitar solo.
The History Of the Guitar Solo
The development and history of the guitar solo is tied very closely to the development of the electric guitar. Every time a new innovation has occurred in the world of music technology a guitarist has risen to the fore and advanced the craft.
Originally there was no such thing as a guitar solo in popular music. Guitars were acoustic only, and due to their lack of volume were not commonly seen on the concert stage. Prior to the invention of the electric guitar jazz bands were much more likely to have a banjo player than a guitarist due to the superior ability of banjo chords to cut through. Even if a band did have a guitarist they would be confined to the rhythm section because even though full chords might be audible above the band, single note phrases would be lost.
In the 1940’s jazz bands got bigger and so did their audiences. Guitarists would soon be swamped beneath the sheer volume, but luckily technology had an answer. The magnetic pickup was invented in the 1940’s; this could be attached to a jazz guitar and used to send a signal to an amplifier such as might be used on a phonograph. The guitar could now be as loud as was required but people did not immediately realise the implications for the guitar as a lead instrument.
Early Pioneers
It was not long before some visionary players realised that equipped with a volume dial the guitar could vary its dynamic range thus allowing a change from chords to audible single notes in the space of a song and thus the guitar solo was born.
One of the very first musicians to realise this fact was Charley Christian.
Charley Christian was in Benny Goodman’s band and used his amplified hollowbody guitar to produce fluid sax like lines defining the course of jazz guitar for the next 20 years. What Charley Christian did in the world of jazz T-Bone Walker did in the world of blues, he used the electric guitar to super charge the acoustic blues of the Mississippi delta to produce the electric sounds of Chicago blues. T-bone’s fresh blues style was an influence on people as revered as BB King and Chuck Berry and most modern blues or rock solos still usually has a lick or two first given an airing on a T-bone 45.
Solos Get Solid
Electric hollow body guitars offered increased volume at a cost. At high volume they would shriek with feedback and buzz with earth hum. A talented guitarist and inventor called Les Paul sawed the sides off his hollowbody guitar and added solid wings that prevented feedback. A company called Gibson loved Les’s idea and Produced the Gibson Les Paul model based on his design equipped with new powerful pickups. The solid body guitar was born.
Clean sounding easy playing guitars inspired a new generation of guitarists to push back the boundaries of the solo. Beat groups took to the solid guitar and the standard layout for most 60’s pop groups included two guitar players.
Hank Marvin guitarist with The Shadows developed a clean bell like soloing sound with vocal like vibrato which popularised instrumental guitar music the world over. Pop groups like the Beatles and the Byrds would often include short very musical solos, but a new breed of young British blues players arrived. Bands like the Yardbirds and Fleetwood Mac took pop sensibilities combined with blues technique and produced new kinds of music with emphasis on soaring lengthy solos. As the 60’s progressed solos broke out of traditional blues shapes and often included eastern sounding modes and exotic scales.
Raw Power
Pop music got ever more popular and bands needed to be louder and louder to be heard by their fans. With new solid guitars and high wattage amplification a strange thing started to happen. When turned up too loud the amps would start to overdrive and the sound would distort. At first seen as a nuisance overdrive was soon recognised by guitarists as something that could be used.
Distorted guitars sounded meaner and more harmonically rich and best of all they sustained for longer allowing notes to hang in the air for a long time. Bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin used this new distorted sound to play wild heavy rock solos. The master of this new heavy rock was Jimi Hendrix. Jimi would run his guitar though huge walls of amplifiers and electronic pedals like the wah-wah and fuzz boxes to create sounds that didn’t even sound like traditional guitar anymore. He used the amplifier not just to make the guitar louder but as part of the sound its self when his guitar screamed with feedback he just incorporated it into the sound. Hendrix used everything he ever heard to play solos incorporating blues, jazz, rock and roll, traditional Indian music, and even sci-fi ray-gun noises into a boiling mass of sound.
The modern rock solo was born.
Twiddley Twiddley Skree!
As the 70’s became the 80’s a new breed of guitar player emerged. Eddie Van Halen came onto the scene and shocked the musical world. He used dramatic new techniques like tapping (striking the fingerboard with the finger tips of both hands instead of picking) and high speed picking runs in triplets that sounded more like Bach than BB King. Van Halen was equipped with a level of technique that far surpassed that of most guitarists of the time. The contemporaries of Van Halen rose to the challenge and the speed of solos increased dramatically. The solos of 80’s rock owed little to the bluesy solos that had gone before and were heavily reliant on classical inspired flurries of notes at lightning speed. Instrumental rock once again became popular and virtuoso guitarists like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani sold out stadiums with gymnastic displays of dexterity.
Modern Times
Guitar music took a sudden u-turn in the early 90’s. Many people felt disenfranchised by the technique first music second soloing of 80’s rock and there was a backlash in the form of Grunge. People proclaimed the era of the guitar hero over, but rumours of the death of the solo were greatly exaggerated and even the Grunge anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had a solo. 90’s alternative and grunge did feature solos but they went back to the very roots of expression and aimed to simply emit raw emotion either through terse musical statements or cathartic bursts of noise.
The best of today’s players combine the styles of all of the eras of soloing. No modern player sums up guitar solos in the 21st century like the guitarist with “Rage Against The Machine” Tom Morrello. Tom Morrello is a maverick and inventive player who users a plethora of techniques to create rich solos. Tom Morrello solos are often made up of technology enhanced squeals and stuttering sounds that mimic the sound of a DJ scratching on turntables as well as speedy runs of jazzy notes and plain old rock riffs.
The term guitar solo conjures up evocative images in the minds of many people. For some it is the sight of the god like guitar hero wringing pure emotion from his tortured axe. For others it is the sight of some wally with a perm and spandex trousers creating the sound of someone wringing a goose’s neck, whilst pulling silly faces.
Confusingly enough a guitar solo is rarely undertaken solo and is usually accompanied by other musicians. It refers to a point in a piece of music where the guitar moves from its home in the rhythm section into the lead section, hence the term lead break is more often more accurately used. During a guitar solo the other instruments are secondary and the guitar maintains melodic interest. Guitar solos are often improvised and vary from a few terse musical phrases designed to compliment a song to self indulgent showboating lasting up to an hour. Debate has raged for many years as to which point between these two extremes constitutes a good guitar solo.
The History Of the Guitar Solo
The development and history of the guitar solo is tied very closely to the development of the electric guitar. Every time a new innovation has occurred in the world of music technology a guitarist has risen to the fore and advanced the craft.
Originally there was no such thing as a guitar solo in popular music. Guitars were acoustic only, and due to their lack of volume were not commonly seen on the concert stage. Prior to the invention of the electric guitar jazz bands were much more likely to have a banjo player than a guitarist due to the superior ability of banjo chords to cut through. Even if a band did have a guitarist they would be confined to the rhythm section because even though full chords might be audible above the band, single note phrases would be lost.
In the 1940’s jazz bands got bigger and so did their audiences. Guitarists would soon be swamped beneath the sheer volume, but luckily technology had an answer. The magnetic pickup was invented in the 1940’s; this could be attached to a jazz guitar and used to send a signal to an amplifier such as might be used on a phonograph. The guitar could now be as loud as was required but people did not immediately realise the implications for the guitar as a lead instrument.
Early Pioneers
It was not long before some visionary players realised that equipped with a volume dial the guitar could vary its dynamic range thus allowing a change from chords to audible single notes in the space of a song and thus the guitar solo was born.
One of the very first musicians to realise this fact was Charley Christian.
Charley Christian was in Benny Goodman’s band and used his amplified hollowbody guitar to produce fluid sax like lines defining the course of jazz guitar for the next 20 years. What Charley Christian did in the world of jazz T-Bone Walker did in the world of blues, he used the electric guitar to super charge the acoustic blues of the Mississippi delta to produce the electric sounds of Chicago blues. T-bone’s fresh blues style was an influence on people as revered as BB King and Chuck Berry and most modern blues or rock solos still usually has a lick or two first given an airing on a T-bone 45.
Solos Get Solid
Electric hollow body guitars offered increased volume at a cost. At high volume they would shriek with feedback and buzz with earth hum. A talented guitarist and inventor called Les Paul sawed the sides off his hollowbody guitar and added solid wings that prevented feedback. A company called Gibson loved Les’s idea and Produced the Gibson Les Paul model based on his design equipped with new powerful pickups. The solid body guitar was born.
Clean sounding easy playing guitars inspired a new generation of guitarists to push back the boundaries of the solo. Beat groups took to the solid guitar and the standard layout for most 60’s pop groups included two guitar players.
Hank Marvin guitarist with The Shadows developed a clean bell like soloing sound with vocal like vibrato which popularised instrumental guitar music the world over. Pop groups like the Beatles and the Byrds would often include short very musical solos, but a new breed of young British blues players arrived. Bands like the Yardbirds and Fleetwood Mac took pop sensibilities combined with blues technique and produced new kinds of music with emphasis on soaring lengthy solos. As the 60’s progressed solos broke out of traditional blues shapes and often included eastern sounding modes and exotic scales.
Raw Power
Pop music got ever more popular and bands needed to be louder and louder to be heard by their fans. With new solid guitars and high wattage amplification a strange thing started to happen. When turned up too loud the amps would start to overdrive and the sound would distort. At first seen as a nuisance overdrive was soon recognised by guitarists as something that could be used.
Distorted guitars sounded meaner and more harmonically rich and best of all they sustained for longer allowing notes to hang in the air for a long time. Bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin used this new distorted sound to play wild heavy rock solos. The master of this new heavy rock was Jimi Hendrix. Jimi would run his guitar though huge walls of amplifiers and electronic pedals like the wah-wah and fuzz boxes to create sounds that didn’t even sound like traditional guitar anymore. He used the amplifier not just to make the guitar louder but as part of the sound its self when his guitar screamed with feedback he just incorporated it into the sound. Hendrix used everything he ever heard to play solos incorporating blues, jazz, rock and roll, traditional Indian music, and even sci-fi ray-gun noises into a boiling mass of sound.
The modern rock solo was born.
Twiddley Twiddley Skree!
As the 70’s became the 80’s a new breed of guitar player emerged. Eddie Van Halen came onto the scene and shocked the musical world. He used dramatic new techniques like tapping (striking the fingerboard with the finger tips of both hands instead of picking) and high speed picking runs in triplets that sounded more like Bach than BB King. Van Halen was equipped with a level of technique that far surpassed that of most guitarists of the time. The contemporaries of Van Halen rose to the challenge and the speed of solos increased dramatically. The solos of 80’s rock owed little to the bluesy solos that had gone before and were heavily reliant on classical inspired flurries of notes at lightning speed. Instrumental rock once again became popular and virtuoso guitarists like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani sold out stadiums with gymnastic displays of dexterity.
Modern Times
Guitar music took a sudden u-turn in the early 90’s. Many people felt disenfranchised by the technique first music second soloing of 80’s rock and there was a backlash in the form of Grunge. People proclaimed the era of the guitar hero over, but rumours of the death of the solo were greatly exaggerated and even the Grunge anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had a solo. 90’s alternative and grunge did feature solos but they went back to the very roots of expression and aimed to simply emit raw emotion either through terse musical statements or cathartic bursts of noise.
The best of today’s players combine the styles of all of the eras of soloing. No modern player sums up guitar solos in the 21st century like the guitarist with “Rage Against The Machine” Tom Morrello. Tom Morrello is a maverick and inventive player who users a plethora of techniques to create rich solos. Tom Morrello solos are often made up of technology enhanced squeals and stuttering sounds that mimic the sound of a DJ scratching on turntables as well as speedy runs of jazzy notes and plain old rock riffs.
