Tips for remembering solos

[Tatosh Guitar]

Any way in particular you guys memorize solos aside of sheer muscle memory? I have noticed I can remember solos I can sorta sing / hum, which usually means very melodic. Rhoads, Adrian Smith, some Gary stuff, Jake E Lee. If a solo has an order, and is hummable, I can remember it, no biggie.


Things start to become a bit harder when that is not the case. Solos from Schenker can be quite melodic, but many times I can't remember which part goes first unless I am playing along to the record as guide. If I use a backing track, I am lost. Same with Glenn Tipton, oddly enough, as he was the melodic one from Priest, in stuff like Beyond the Realms of Death or A Touch of Evil. I believe I can play most of those parts, technically speaking, but remember in which order they go is the hard part.


I seem to remember Andy G saying something similar, and it being the main reason why he would cover solos from certain players instead of others.


So, any suggestions?

[merlo_zeppelin]

Some solos are easier to remember than others.

What has worked best for me, is identify the different phrases. Have a clear understanding of where each phrase begins and ends. Once you have that down, you will see than in every solo, these phrases relate to each other in some sort of pattern; in can be a simple call & response, a AAB type thing, AABB, or some other type. With this in mind, memorizing the solo becomes much easier because you've divided it up in smaller pieces you can remember and connect, much like lyrics.

Memory is a funny thing though, sometimes your brain will not retain some stuff no matter how hard you pound it, or might decide to remember it different to what it actually is. There's always a lick that I think I remember but when I play it it doesn't come out right or a solo that I'm sure I know but right in the middle of it I go blank

[Dinosaur David B]

Dude. If I don't play them regularly, I can't remember how to play MY OWN damn guitar solos! I know how they go in my head, but my fingers don't remember immediately. For me, it's very much a case of use it or lose it. It'll always come back eventually, but for example, if I had to play any of my Feints solos right now, it wouldn't be pretty.

[Joebuddha]

I have a huge problem with this man.

I cannot remember songs or solos unless I play them constantly. I spent an hour this morning relearning the comfortably numb solo yet again. I always remember the gross motor moves and the big main licks but the little details and the end part of that solo always escape me unless I have the sheet music in front of me. I can't tell you how many times I've learned the solo to Sweet Child O Mine. Which is another thing, if a song is in Eb I never practice it because I don't have a guitar tuned down to Eb and generally I'm just to lazy to retune. There are certain really easy ones that are kind of baked in to my brain like Good Times Bad Times, or Living Loving Maid, or Stairway.

But I probably couldn't get all the way through Crossroads at gunpoint.

[Andy G]

Tatosh Guitar said:


I seem to remember Andy G saying something similar, and it being the main reason why he would cover solos from certain players instead of others.


So, any suggestions?


[/quote]
Absolutely. If the solo has a distinct, hummable melody and/or distinctive phrasing then my brain can retain it. Which means (usually) most pentatonic stuff just goes in one ear and out the other. Schenker is the worst culprit for playing endless streams of "meh" pentatonics. Norum is another. It can still be cool of course, but by definition, it's not melodic. Regardless of the scale, when guys let the fingers do the work, rather the ears (i.e. if they're not hitting chord tones on the strong beats), there's no melody for the brain to latch on to. Viv Campbell did that a lot. This is where the idiosyncrasies of a player's style comes in - if you're familiar enough with the way somebody else plays - their favourite positions, favoured fingers, etc. then you can fairly easily work out what to play and follow them on autopilot. For the record - I was able to do that with Mattias Jabs and John Sykes. Other players much less so.


So... what to do to improve things?


There's a saying amongst musicians - "quick to learn, quick to forget". And it's the absolute truth.


If you learn something quickly and you're not reinforcing it by playing it often and for some time, your brain will deem this information as being relatively unimportant and that information will be thrown out in favour of new information that comes along. People talk about "muscle memory", but that's actually not a thing... it's about neural pathways. When you first learn something, the signals from your brain to your muscles follow a path - from neuron to neuron to get to where it's going. At first, it's a very complex, strangled and inefficient path. But as you practise over time, the brain finds shortcuts to get that same information to your muscles, using ever shorter and more efficient routes through the neurons, which become more established the more you do it. If you tread the same pathways over and over and over, they will eventually become familiar enough that it doesn't take much maintenance to re-establish - even if you haven't played that thing for a while. That's what happens when you come back to something you used to know and you're really rusty, but before long you get that "ah yes!" moment and the fingers seem to remember. It's the brain blowing the cobwebs off the old pathway that you used to walk.


The bottom line is that you MUST play these things over and over to retain them. It's also important to get your ears around the solo as much as your fingers. Make an mp3 of the solo and stick it on your smartphone and listen to it over and over when you're out walking or whenever you get a chance. It's harder to do that with the pentatonic waffle solos that have no tension/release and no chord tones, but if you bombard your brain with it, you will build a clearer mental picture of it, which will help you when you're trying to reproduce it - you won't have to keep referring back to the audio so often.


Of the few solo covers that I did, most were learned just for making a video and I never played them again afterwards. If I had to play any of them now, I couldn't do it. I think I could piece together Rock You Like a Hurricane fairly quickly. But that's because the melody of it is quite firmly in my brain.

Something very important to consider is motivation...


If you're REALLY motivated to learn something, you will do it. Your drive and work ethic will get you there. If you have only a passing interest in doing something, then as soon as you run into obstacles and adversity, you'll abandon it as being "too difficult". I've been teaching guitar since the late 1980s and I can tell you with confidence that it's rarely the case that something is really "too difficult" to learn. Even if a technique is beyond you, you should still be able to learn it and remember it and play it at a slower speed. What trips people up is work ethic, consistency, commitment, drive etc. I can tell very quickly whether a student is going to succeed in their goals or not, based on how committed and consistent they are. It has very, very, VERY little to do with "talent" or "musical ability". To the point where "talent" is whether somebody has the work ethic or not. There are ZERO good guitarists that didn't put the work in. And there are ZERO guitarists that put the work in that didn't become good. There are a lot of guitarists who are not good, who would disagree with me on that, claiming they did put the work in and got no results, but I can tell you as an experienced teacher that this is a coping mechanism for justifying giving up once they realised it would take more work than they were prepared to put in. Believe me - they did NOT put the required work in.


That was a big problem for me doing solo covers, because I have never been motivated to do them - I never wanted to play solo covers. It was never easy for me and that's why I didn't do many. If you REALLY want to learn something, then you will commit to it. You can't fake this kind of thing - your brain won't co-operate if you aren't genuinely motivated to learn something. If it makes you feel any better, it has nothing to do with guitar playing ability!



Sorry for the long post. I hope some of this is useful!

[merlo_zeppelin]

I agree with everything Andy said

[Tatosh Guitar]

That post is absolute gold Andy. I agree with pretty much everything. Thank you for taking the time to write about it.


There's stuff out there I can play on my sleep. More often than not it's stuff I learned as a teenager. To this day I can play the entire solo to Hotel California, note for note, without even thinking about it. Same for songs like Fade to Black, or some of the Jabs era Scorpions songs.


But yeah, once we hit pentatonics territory, it goes out of the window. I think Schenker is one of the hardest on that department for me.

[Eclipse II]

Totally agree with what Andy said above. I find that I tend to spend a lot more time

on my acoustic these days learning songs and singing along. When I fire up my electric again it’s to learn the song. Very little of my time is spent soloing. I just find that many of the solos in my favourite songs are basically just the guitar player ripping through finger patterns rather than playing something that fits the chords.

[Dr Nick]

The solos I remember are the ones I've played at multiple shows in the past, or ones I've really liked and listen to regularly.

There are plenty which I learned for a gig, played once, and never again. Could probably re-learn them quickly, but don't carry them in my head. Agree with Tatosh, stuff I learned as a teenager is pretty much all still there.


Funny how memory works.

[Tatosh Guitar]

Dr Nick said:


The solos I remember are the ones I've played at multiple shows in the past, or ones I've really liked and listen to regularly.

There are plenty which I learned for a gig, played once, and never again. Could probably re-learn them quickly, but don't carry them in my head. Agree with Tatosh, stuff I learned as a teenager is pretty much all still there.


Funny how memory works.


[/quote]
I honestly wish i had progressed more as a player when I was a teen cause that would give me a better chance to be the player I have always wanted to be now. But access to the stuff I wanted to learn wasn't what it currently is. I had a hard time even finding the good albums as it was.