Tips on soloing with chords???????

I don't like playing single notes. I would like to learn how to solo with chords, tips & books?????????/

You don't like playing single notes? What do you mean? How to solo with chords? Are you trying to find shortuts on how to play lead guitar? There is no shortcuts. basically, lead solos comes with single notes and followed by anoher notes. That is how lead solo works. I think all you need is to start to learn scales. Scales are variety. From basic pentatonic scales to diminished scales and many more...

If you said that playing lead solo - note by note is what you hate, you are probably not into the right path of learning solo. Concentrate on your picking and fingering technique, then you may know what is the real meaning of playing solo or lead. Of course, before you go further, you must know all chords if possible... major, major7, minor7, diminished, 9th....bla bla bla...

Imagine what happen if you play lead solo without knowing the base of chords and don't know what scales to put in, you will probably play boring solos. And a lot but not all, alternative bands play boring solos... e.g If you know this scales, they always play minor pentatonic. I don't want to mention this band coz' afraid this will affect their fans as well as themselves. They can improve their guitar solo because at least they know the chords progression basically or at least they know guitar chords well. Hope this one shows you the point.

Don't worry, you still have time to learn... take your time.

yeah dude you can't solo without playing single notes, the whole idea of soloing is to playing single notes that will match the chords, and if you want to write a good solo, you just need to work with the notes that your chords are built
from and to use matching scales over them... for example: you playing a progression that goes like that"

Em A13| Gm7 C7/9| Em7 A13| C7/9

so a good idea for a base for solo can be:
(im not tabbing it, just giving you the notes)
E F# F D
E F# D
as you can see i just took the highest notes of each chord and played with them
the scale you can use here is mainly Em and any variation of it because you can also see the phrygian mode hiding here somewhere and more thinks that im not sure about them

If you want a good book get a Keith Wiatt movie it helped me with my chords but it does not teach you scales. :cool:

I'd look into some of the blues and country styles. A lot of their solos use 2 or 3 strings at a time as lil mini chords in a sense. People such as Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits), Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top), and a bunch of others...hell almost everyone uses this every now and then. But like was said above, yer gonna need to know yer chords and scales.

"yeah dude you can't solo without playing single notes"

That seems like a pretty damn ridiculous thing to say. Especially with a SN like Zeppelin. Page did plenty of lead work using diads and triads.

Reddiva, you should check these guitar players out, I think you'd benefit from learning some of their riffs/leads:

Mark from On The Speakers
Jimmy from Elefant
David Bryson/Dave Immerglick from Counting Crows (even if you hate their music, they're both wonderful players)
Edge from (duh) U2
Johnny Buckland from Coldplay

And the country idea is a very good one.

Obviously some theory will help out a lot when trying to put multiple notes together on the fly, but you could have a degree in music theory for all we know.

Best of luck!

two handed tapping most often uses chord fingerings for the fretting hand as well....

WHOA... I think an intervention is in order...

To say that soloing can only be done with single-notes is narrow-minded. I am not trying to put anybody that said this down, but if you are saying this, you probably haven't heard much of the work of jazz giants like Joe Pass and Gerry Beaudoin.

Think about this... when Dave Brubeck gets on the piano and plays a solo, for the most part he doesn't play single notes. He plays chords in conjunction with one another that also have a melody in them. Who says that a guitar cannot do the same thing?

The great Joe Pass changed the way many guitarists looked at the fretboard. When playing, he found ways of weaving chords and melodies into one. This meant that he didn't even need a band to back him up most of the time! And when he was in front of a band, he sounded even more incredible!

For the most part, chord/melody solos haven't broken into rock guitar. Hopefully, that will change. The first thing I would do is pick up some recordings. Joe Pass is a great start (any album of his will do).

You could from there buy transcriptions books of his, but you may not want to...

Soloing with chords is much harder than single notes because not only do you have to make sure one note fits over the chord background, you have to make sure all the notes fit.

Try this to start off. Get a Dminor vamp going. Now play a simple 3 note melody over it. Write it down. In that same key (let's say you're playing in D Dorian minor - no sharps, no flats), write the thirds and fifths over the 3 notes you originally played. Now play the melody again, but this time play it with the harmonies on top. Congratulations, you are soloing with chords.

Originally Posted by: zreynoldsptwo handed tapping most often uses chord fingerings for the fretting hand as well....

true, but i dont think reddiva is up to that quite yet. i may be jumping to conclustions-correct me if im wrong.