Over the past year, I've noticed that some solos and riffs I can pick up very quickly. Within an hour or two, I'll have it all down and can play it from memory with or without a backing track. Examples of this would be Let it Be, Day Tripper, and Whole Lotta Love.

Then there are those that don't seem much more difficult, but will take hours to get one piece down, days for the entire thing. During this time I'll have to keep going back and refreshing what I had done already. It can then take a week or two for me to be able to commit it to memory to the point where I can play it with or without a backing track and feel the rhythm in what I'm playing. Hard to Handle and China Grove are examples of this.

For instance, I had finally nailed the first half of the China Grove solo the other night. I played it over a loop I recorded of the rhythm part. 10 times in a row I played it flawlessly - yes I counted!! The next day, I couldn't do it and kept messing up timing and throwing extra notes in. It's like my fingers insist on some of the phrases being different. Some of the phrases are unlike anything I've played before.

Does this get better with time? Is it a matter of expanding your phrase vocabulary to the point where everything is just a variation on something you've done before?

Lord help me if I ever decide to learn something like Fade to Black (Metallica) with it's really long intro and solo! It would take me a year :-).

Anybody else go through this? Does it get better? Is it a matter of my "musical memory" isn't what it could/should be?