Just can't nail the solo...

[suckish]

I've been playing guitar for about 2 months.. I've been trying to get down a solo for the song "Jesus of Suburbia" by Green day. I can play the entire song perfectly until that one little part in the solo...

G|-9p8p6-9p8p6-9p8p6-9p6---11p9p8-11p9p8-11p9p8-11p9p8-11p8---|
D|----------------------8----------------------------------------10--|

I've tried it a lot of different ways for about a month now but I can't hit it... is can anyone give me any tips for this? Thank you in advance.

[estetic]

Download a program called "Audacity" and trim out the solo section of the song, then slow it down by 50%, play along to this over and over and ov.... then try and do it at full speed. If you still have issues try slowing it down by 25% and playing along with that.

A couple of clicks around google will turn up tutorials for working with songs in audacity to get this done.

[Bryan Connolly]

How much of your practice time are you spending on this one lick? If you answered "most" or "all", you may think you're on the right track, but unless you're a very special person you're most likely on the path to frustration and giving up. I would devote maybe 5-10 minutes to this, or however long it is before frustration creeps in. Then focus on things that don't frustrate you, and have some fun. When you're only two months in, it's easy to expect too much from yourself and get discouraged. When you've been playing for a few years and you feel you've made significant progress, you'll more than likely have good strategies for dealing with frustration.

[quickfingers]

find the trouble spot(s)! for your experience level, even a simple thing like this can be daunting to play correctly. first of all, i know it's hard but forget about trying to learn licks without knowing where the come from. studying chord/key relationships along with practicing is important to really understand WHY you're playing that and WHY it sounds good to you.

practicing right/left hand exercises is important for any guitarist, and there's never too early a time to start adopting these things. work on picking speed with a metronome, doing quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes at various tempos, then start working in triplets soon after. practice purely alternate picking along with only downstrokes and only upstrokes. with your fretting hand, work on various four-note-per-string patterns that are symmetrical up the neck. start to mix things up by using three-note-per-string, then two-note-per-string. always practice these exercises with alt picking.

this is simple, but the backbone for building chops. with a few months of dilligent practice, your issues will dissolve, at least the simpler ones. but by in large, ISOLATE DIFFICULTY. if you have trouble with something, find out why and find exercises to fix the problem. often, playing part of the lick over and over again, without the rest of it, can clue you in to exactly what issues you're dealing with.


pick up some troy stetina books, they go from beginner to somewhat advanced stuff.