Rock Guitar Soloing
View a promo video of author and instructor Robin Stone discussing Rock Guitar Soloing.
Many guitarists learn to solo by co-opting the technical licks and riffs from their favorite players into their own playing, while adding in their own personal feel and emotion. The result of this approach is that guitarists end up knowing how to improvise in a particular style, but lack the technical understanding of why these solos work. Rock Guitar Soloing is designed to help guitarists who may have learned the technical aspects of playing, but lack the theoretical application of the musical elements that make up a strong solo. Through video, audio, diagrams, and discussions, the course explores the technical aspects of what makes a successful solo – form scales and arpeggios and new ways to practice them, to applying them to an improvisational context.
You will learn how to identify various modal progressions and their characteristics, and how to play and think within a diatonic framework as a means of organizing your musical vocabulary. You will listen to solos from artists such as David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Pete Townsend (The Who), Joe Walsh (The Eagles), Robby Krieger (The Doors), Duane Allman (The Allman Brothers), Keith Richards (The Rolling Stones), Steve Clark (Def Leppard), Stevie Ray Vaughn, Eric Clapton, and John Mayer, identify the techniques in the solos that make them effective, and learn how to apply those concepts to your own playing. The course also explores tone, phrasing, theme, variation and other improvisational techniques. The goal of the course is to better equip you with a harmonic understanding of the elements of a solo that you can then implement into your own playing regardless of style.
By the end of the course, you will be able to:
- improvise using pentatonic scales, arpeggios, and modes over various types of chords and chord progressions
- construct solos more logically and methodically
- develop your own unique style of improvisation
- have a better understanding of chord scale relationships
Ready to Enroll? |
Online Summer Term Starts July 1st
Course Info
| For-credit tuition: $1,400 |
|
Non-credit tuition: $1,200 Add 6 CEUs: $25.00 |
| Credits: 3 |
| Duration: 12 weeks |
| Catalog #: BMP-129 |
Course Faculty 
| Robin Stone Associate Professor at Berklee and guitarist, teaching classes in the history and playing styles of the era’s most well-known guitarists. | |
Student Comments
"This was a phenomenal course, the best I have taken yet at Berklee. The instructor was able to effectively communicate key aspects of guitar playing, which were invaluable. She was very helpful during the chats and gave multiple PDF documents throughout each lesson to look at." - A. Bustamante
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Berklee College of Music is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC)
