playing to chord progressions

Hey all. Been playing guitar for like 8 months now, and I've got a theory question. I was watching yngwie's hot licks video the other day, and it has this section about playing to a chord progression. In this section, good 'ole yngwie sits there and solos without end to a given chord progression. After watching this, I realized it didn't explain anything! It just gave a chord progression and showed footage of yngwie soloing! Well how exactly does one make a well-rounded solo that fits to a chord progression? In my classical theory class, we were taught to just make the melody line with notes from whatever chord that's playing at each beat. But for someone like yngwie who does 6 trillion notes per solo, it seems kind of confining to stick to the notes of a triad. Are you just supposed to move around the chord diatonically? If so, what are the limits? What scale tones is it better to stick to? Thanks!

Do yourself a favor.....burn the Yngvie video. It's supposed to be an "instructional" video, and in that aspect it's one of the worst instructional videos I've ever seen. Buy a video of someone who knows how to explain himself, rather then just soloing shamelessly in front of the camera at high speed.

Yeah ,I say forget about Malmsteen's vid too , not pretty helpfull specialy for beginners ... It's actualy more like a tab book with some live clips !

Back to the subject , to solo over a progression you first need to know your soloing scale ... You can guess it (you'll need some experience for this) or do your homework and analyze the chords .
About which notes fits better to which chords and from which octave, that's just a matter of tastes , you should practice jamming along with rhythm tracks a lot , you'll develope your own taste of improvising by time.
One trick Marty Friedman uses , is to arpegiate the notes of the chord that's being played (you can never go wrong by doing this) ... Actualy this is quite helpfull to move to a different octave , but you'll need to develope your sweep picking technique to a decent level to be able to arpegiate faster.

Yeah sounds like Yngwie was more into showing off than actually trying to teach someone about his style. His technique is basically either playing a scale ascending to a given chord really fast, or just messing around with the arpeggios within a given scale. That's mostly what he does, and if you want to imitate him just do that. Standard Classical repertoire.

To add with what SLY said about picking the right scale for a chord progression. Just match it like this:

Any major chord: Use the pentatonic major scale. Match the root E major chord, E major pentatonic.

Any minor chord: Use the minor pentatonic scale.

Diminished and Augmented: Whole tone scale.

This will get you started. While your working on these, pick up some theory (chord and scale analysis). Once you get familiar with these try using other scales. Scales that work best over a chord contain the same notes. Like a G mixolydian mode goes good with a G dominant 7 chord because both have the notes, G, B, D, and F. That's should get you started. Once you learn more scale and more theory, you'll get to understand it better and be able to grasp your own style.

[Edited by noticingthemistake on 06-25-2003 at 11:38 AM]

There is a simple approach to this subject. I've just written a page to explain this, hopefully, simply, called Basic Guitar.
http://members.tripod.com/~griphon2/index-18.html
the index page or title page.

Knowing this plain information will, quite frankly, with listening and playing to what you like will solve many problems. One needn't know complex theory to function, but it helps.