Live ‘Ukulele

Soloing is one of the hardest things to do in music – and it is one the best ways to separate the good from the great. To solo in a song you need to know a few things: what key the song is in, a scale that works with that key, how to emphasize the right notes, and a decent sense of “what comes next”.

You should know what key a song is in before you start playing, so if you are not sure, ask. (For this lesson, just to keep things simple I will use the key of C for examples.) Most of the time if you are playing a song in the key of C, you use a C scale to play a solo. If you are playing a chord that has notes outside of the C Major scale like A7 (A7 has a C# in it) you need to play an A scale instead of a C scale, then you change back when you stop playing A7.

This is an advanced lesson so you should know your C Major scale. If you don’t, go learn it right now.

There are many different scales that you can use for soloing (I think there are 19 or 20) Major scales that are the easiest to learn and use. They sound good over Major chords (go figure). The Major Pentatonic sounds best over Major and Major 6 chords. The Minor Pentatonic sounds good over Major, Minor, Minor 7, Minor 9, Minor 11, Minor 6, Minor 6/9, Minor 13, and Dominant Seventh chords. The Minor Pentatonic is great for soloing in the twelve bar blues. There are many others that you can learn. If you would like to learn them I would suggest getting a chord and scale table that shows how to write scales and what genre and chords they work well with (this is a fairly standard music store item). I have put the notes of some of the scales up on a scales page.

To make a scale work for soloing you need to emphasize some of the notes. The main note you should emphasize (start and stop on) is the key note, C if you are playing in the key of C, G if you are playing in the key of G, etc. In his lessons, Herb Ohta Jr. suggests starting and stopping riffs on the notes of the chord that is being played (if you are soloing over a C chord, start and stop on the notes: C-E-G). This is important to making your solos sound great, so practice starting on the chord notes, and stopping on the chord notes.

The sense of “what comes next” is something that you develop as you log more and more hours of practicing your solos. It’s not just playing a note and hoping that it sounds good, but hearing somewhere off in your head what should be played next - “hey, this would be cool!” Listen to Carlos Santana; the guy is the most phenomenal soloist you will ever hear.

Practice is the only way to learn this, so jam with your buddies or along with a recorded song as often as you can. This will teach you what sounds good and what doesn’t.

This is just one take on soloing, so use what you can, build on it, and maybe someday we will see you in concert.