In this guitar lesson, you’ll learn some of the most common ways to play country and bluegrass lead guitar solos. First, I’ll show you five of the best ways to create a guitar solo and we’ll talk about different techniques you can use to improvise better lead guitar solos. Next, we’ll get some ear training practice while we learn the basic guitar melody for “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”. Finally, I’ll show you some nice ways to transform a basic guitar solo melody into a fancier country and bluegrass solo — these techniques will work for soloing over just about every country and bluegrass song. After you master the solos, practice your lead guitar improvising over our “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” backing track in the key of G. Also check out our collection of bluegrass guitar licks for some more lead guitar improvising ideas.
Video 1 – Basic Melody Solo Playthrough with Tablature
Try to use this video to do some ear training…play the video, look away from the screen, and see if you can pick out the melody on your guitar. Don’t worry about learning the basic melody exactly as I play it — as long as you’re close, you’ll be ready to learn more improvising tips under the “Extra Improvising Tips” lesson tab just above this video.
Video 2 – Fancier Melody Solo Playthrough with Tablature
In this video, we’re going to make the basic solo melody sound a little fancier by adding extra melody notes and by adding a couple of tasteful bluegrass guitar licks. Under the “Extra Improvising Tips” lesson tab, we’ll discuss the fancier melody solo in more detail.
Extra Improvising Tips
In this video, we’ll talk about some different ways you can transform a basic melody into an interesting country & bluegrass guitar solo. We’ll also talk about how to use bluegrass guitar licks in a solo. After you watch this video, try using some of the bluegrass licks in our Bluegrass Lick Library to improvise guitar solos over our bluegrass backing track for “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”.
New guitar lesson! I’ve been getting a lot of requests for more lead guitar videos teaching how to jam over any song so I hope this is helpful. We have a lot of great lessons on the way — several classic country lessons and more bluegrass also. One artist that keeps coming up in requests is Sturgill Simpson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5cMqD0WqYE I’m a big fan of his stuff too so I’ll definitely throw something together in his style.
Thanks for watching!
Devin
Thanks for the explanations it really helps me!
This lesson light up my musician lamp….
Great lesson Devin! Your explanations are always spot on. Looking forward to more!!
Good lesson, good explanation into a few questions I had so it’s good timing. I was wanting to ask about performing a solo and when to use each scale. Really looking forward to may be improving my improvisation skills.
Thanks very much
Thanks Justin! Actually sitting here tabbing out some new licks and saw your comment come through. I think you’ll really like the next series of improvising videos. I’ll try to add plenty more scale theory. Hope you can put it all to good use!
new licks coming straight from texas !
Thanks Devin looking forward to it
Thé lesson and the backing are very helpful…thanks again Devin!
Hi Devin,
do you play licks based on the G cord for Em and C chord licks for Am?
Thanks Paul D
Hi Paul – There are some nice licks you can play over the Em when you’re in the key of G and over Am when you’re in C. I can make a note to add some of those licks to a future lesson video. Thanks for the idea.
Thank you
great lesson. Really looking forward to building up my mental library of licks. Thanks for breaking this down Devin.
in the tab for circle the notes and the tab are different Is there a reason?
Auch wieder klasse!!!