Thanks for the support and detailed explanation!
As a matter of fact, when you started describing the “rubber banding” technique, I had one of those “wait a minute …” moments! A couple weeks ago as I was stuck with the solo thinking I’d never get it up to full tempo, I did a search on the community to see how others approached the subject, and came up on this excellent explanation of yours from Feb 2022.
Up to then I was trying to slowly increase the tempo, a little at the time, not going beyond where I was already comfortable at. Since I’ve adopted this method (practice slowly to avoid mistakes, and “crazy fast” to break the rut), I’ve made visible progress.
One other thing that I did not need with my earlier practice, but with this solo made a ton of difference is to “warm up” the fingers before the main course: as I sit down to practice the solo, I start by doing a bit of “finger gym”, some spider walks and scales. Some 10min or so of this and then I have my fingers ready for the rest of the practice.
On using loops and learning sections: totally agreed! Personally, I love Anytune Pro (iOS only) for that, as it allows me to mark a song into individual sections, setup loops, etc. Since this is a complicated solo, I naturally picked-up where there are clearly defined frases and learnt them one at a time - and in fact only finished this process last weekend.
When starting a new section, on a constant repeat at a moderate speed, I found it also works if before I start trying to play I just “sing along” (solfegge?) to the notes, until I can do that consistently from memory. Having the phrase down right in my mind/voice seems to help a lot in guiding the finger to do the right thing 