Been playing for well over 10 years. Tried several times to learn to solo, hours and hours spent on scales, yet when I started soloing was underwhelmed with what I did and gave up. Third time lucky. Picked up the challenge again. One bit of gear that’s helped a lot is a looper.
First challenge is getting a looper that isn’t hard to use. I recall a Justin lesson on the topic. The research I did (forums, etc) gave me the strong impression a 2 button looper pedal is a LOT easier than the one button which requires a double tap.
I bought my looper many years ago and with the 2 buttons it’s always been easy for me to use. Only took a small number of tries to get the start and stop of the loop in time with the 4 bar beat. The model I bought is the Ditto X2.
With my learning to solo, the looper has been helpful in 2 ways. First, I put down a sequence of bars, in my case I’ve been playing along to Wagon Wheel so it’s a sequence of 8 bars in total. Then I just noodle along to that loop.
The other challenge I’ve faced with soloing is that I’m a rhythm player, and am used to just strumming along to the whole song (or fingerstyling along). Then when it’s time for me to play a solo, I get all befuddled and flummoxed trying to get started on the solo. Very frustrating.
With my learning to solo, I’ve recently come up with several of my own solos, but trying to mix them up with strumming, then soloing, then strumming to wagon wheel just made me all the more befuddled.
Enter the looper. Today I spent quite some time with the 8 bars in the looper, strumming along to the first 8, then soloing for the next 16 bars, then back to strumming for 8, soloing for 16, etc and at last was able to make the transition from rhythm, to solo, back to rhythm, to solo, etc etc
Woo Hoo.
It’s still messy at times but for me, more often than not, it was very good.
The same could be done with a backing track on repeat, for me I seem to enjoy the looper more. And having a looper that’s easy to use sure helps.
