Play a Few One-Note Guitar Solos

Play a Few One-Note Guitar Solos
By Jason Earls, author of How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Red Zen, & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711


Occasionally you should consider playing a one-note solo on your electric guitar. I'm serious. You should play a solo consisting of only a single note treated in many different ways. Why? Because simplicity in music (and in life) is important and highly effective; and what could be simpler in musical improvisation than playing a solo consisting of only one note? Also, it was Einstein who said that things should be kept as simple as possible but no simpler, and they don't get much smarter than Einstein. Minimalism can be a nice effective idea when used moderately in music. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great philosopher, was a minimalist and also a rather laconic speaker since he thought that whatever cannot be expressed clearly should be dismissed in silence; and he reasoned further that things in the world that can SHOW themselves, yet cannot be spoken about constitute what is “mystical." But I seem to have gotten away from talking about one-note solos, so I shall return to that subject:

You can have your single-note solo last for as long as you like. Four bars, eight bars, twelve bars, sixteen bars, or more; and the background chords and accompaniment can change behind you or underneath you as much as is necessary, plus you can insert plenty of dynamics into the note as well. I recommend that you experiment with other musicians in your band in having them change chord progressions or transpose the riffs into different keys behind your one-note solo, or direct them to do anything you want really, while you maintain playing that single note on your electric guitar and hold it throughout the entire solo.

Add vibrato. Pick the note repeatedly; fast or slow. Go in and out of time with the rhythm of the tune. Stop playing the note briefly. Add space and plenty of breathing room. Bend the note a little, but not too much (use microtonal bends - quarter steps or less, smears I believe they are called) because you never want to stray too far from the single tone you have chosen to express yourself with. Mainly you should concentrate on that one note while attempting to instill as much energy, emotion, spirituality, passion, yearning, tension, persuasion, release, and everything else you’ve got inside your heart and mind, pushing it into your one-note solo; execute it while incorporating whatever you have boiling inside of you.

And when choosing the note for your solo, make sure it is the absolute BEST NOTE that you can find. Actually, it must be the PERFECT note that fits (or goes against) the song you are playing, because it will be the MAIN note of the solo.

What could a single note solo be compared to in real life? Are there some comparisons we could make? Of course there are.

Sometimes people have an entire meal consisting of only one dish, Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography how he moved to a new town when he was a young man and could afford only a loaf of bread for his single meal of the day; and a truck driver I once worked with went into a grocery store on his lunch break and purchased a single package of bologna and ate only that for his noon day meal; he had no bread, no mustard, no cheese, no mayonnaise, no pickles, no relish, no ketchup, and nothing to drink either - he only had the bologna which he took out of the package and folded in half and bit into with his sharp false teeth.

Are these things like single note solos? I guess they could considered similar, in a way. It just depends on how you observe the situation and analyze it. And your viewpoint of the world and the people around you.

Also many punk bands do not play electric guitar solos at all; so if you decide to play a one note solo, you can consider yourself to be a slightly more sophisticated musician than those in punk bands.

Another reason for playing a single-note solo is that it may help your ideas improve. Years ago (and even to this day) when I was first learning about improvisation, and practicing my guitar a lot, I would notice that whenever I would practice every day, playing for many hours, my ideas during improvisational solos would become noticeably stale and uninspired, as if I were merely playing the same ideas over and over. But if I did not practice much during any particular day, or even skipped a few days of playing altogether, even though my technique would decrease considerably and I would play rather sloppily, whenever it came time to improvise, my ideas would be fresh and exciting and exuberant and alive and it would seem like I was playing entirely new melodies that had never existed before. So when your improvisations start to go stale, remember to play a few one-note solos, and you may get some good improvisational ideas for the next songs you play.

Another thing that might be considered similar to one-note solos is the word 'abacot,' which is a word that exists in dictionaries but is not in fact a real word; it was simply a misprint that happened many years ago and lexicographers kept copying the same mistake over and over again. How could a one-note solo be considered similar to the word abacot? Well many musicians probably do not think a single note solo is a "real" solo, in a legitimate sense, because it isn't complicated or sophisticated or impressive enough, just as abacot is not considered a "real" word, although it is still listed in many dictionaries.

But one-note solos can be quite expressive if they are approached in the right way. Actually that is the challenge I am trying to convey to you here in this article. I want to encourage you to make your one-note solo interesting by adding other things to it: Phrasing, conviction, picking technique, fingering, incorporation of various attitudes, different methods of attack, manipulation of tone, stylistic subtleties used in as many different ways as possible to make the single note solo sound fresh and passionate and exciting. Good luck.

Source:

"On Soloing," How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Jason Earls, Pleroma Publications, 2007.

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(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this piece, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)

http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/

Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.