How To Make Your Guitar Solos Sound Intense By Playing Less Notes

by Tom Hess

One of the biggest signs that your guitar soloing skills need improvement is when you’re playing too many notes without giving yourself time to think. This leads to amateur sounding guitar phrasing that quickly becomes boring and predictable.

You create excitement in your guitar solos by building/releasing tension. It’s difficult to do this when you constantly play new notes and leave little space in between each one.

One of the best ways to create tension in your guitar solos is to practice using varying lengths of silence between your notes.

This achieves the following:

• You increase the amount of tension in your solo. Adding silence creates a sense of anticipation for anyone listening to you play. This makes them wonder what will come next… and your guitar solos more interesting without playing any new notes.
   
• You get more time to think about what you want to play next. This is crucial for playing better phrases that don’t sound rushed or repetitive.

Watch this video to learn how to use silence in your guitar solos to give them an undeniable power to reach out and grab the attention of others:

Want to learn more ways to quickly develop better lead guitar playing skills? Read this article to get more lead guitar tips and learn how to improvise cool solos.

About Tom Hess: Tom Hess is a guitar teacher, music career mentor and guitar teacher trainer. He teaches rock guitar lessons online to students from all over the world and conducts instructional live guitar training events attended by musicians from over 50 countries.

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