Yes, learning other people's solos.
It's like with scales and riffs and licks you have learned a pile of words in language. Maybe some grammar. But you have no practice putting them together into sentences, expressing yourself. Kids copy their parents learning language. You copy your heros learning to solo.
Doing this for a while, I found that suddenly I was having phrases and expressions "under my fingers" that "just work" when I need them to. I'm still at the beginning of the road, but this was a breakthrough for me.
As a concrete example of how I made it work, a solo I love is Comfortably Numb (the outro). This is a challenging thing to learn (for me) just technically. So that took a while. Once I had that, I then looked for variants of it ... live versions. I learned those. Then I looped a backing track of that chord progression and started mixing up the phrases from the various versions. Suddenly it unlocked... I started being able to mix it up and do my own thing.
There is another important skill that learning someone elses solo gives you. It is the skill of hearing something ... in your head ... and being able to put it onto the guitar.
At first you are doing this with other people's notes. You listen to a fragment of the solo and find where it is on the fretboard. At first that is hard and slow and tedious. But with practice you get faster and faster at this, learning other people's solos.
Suddenly you reach a point where you can hear *in your head* a *new* phrase that you think would go well and you can quickly find it on the keyboard. Absolutely essential skill, this is a way to get it.
HTH.
GaJ
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Guitar Lesson Guide