Photo Credit: Courtesy Survival Management
“Guitar solos are back,” Zakk Wylde proclaims. Whether or not they were ever really out of style is debatable, but there’s no denying the artistry of a great solo. Here, eight of the best players in the business reveal their secret recipes to a perfect solo. Listen in!
Stevie Ray Vaughan
“When [a solo is] right, I get chill bumps and things when it feels good.”
Carlos Santana
“If you play a 32-bar solo, the first 8-12 bars should be something that people can whistle. Like a theme: the cow … the cow went home … the cow went home because she wanted to get milked. That’s a theme. What you’d call lyrical. I’ve been accused of being a very melodic, lyrical person. That’s ok. The rest of the bars you try to go where Coltrane went — you start speaking with melodies that have fire, like speaking in tongues, language that your mind may not understand as much but your heart will. It’s like a deck of cards. You have different hands — this queen goes with this, that ace goes with that. For me, music is a balance of feminine and masculine. Feminine is the melody, masculine is the rhythm. The bed don’t matter. Sooner or later they got to get in bed, do something natural and normal. So, in my solos, I try to bring all of that in.”
Angus Young
“I just want to add to the song [with a solo]. I don’t want to take away from it. You don't want to suddenly give a raging solo in song where really it should be sitting in there. Sometimes it can go over the top. Guys will try to get in every lick they can get, cover every bit of space. We just like to go with what the track requires. [Constructing my solos is] mainly spontaneous. I mean, there are some things I’ve played where I've gone, ‘How in the hell did I do that?’ You can sit there and try to figure it out for years, and there's nothing to match that. In the early days, if you were playing an A chord, you might play a solo that's in A. But then again, you might put progressions or notes in there that don't sound right. It sounds like you're playing in the wrong key or something, and sometimes that works.”
James Hetfield
“Being a singer, there are very few songs I listen to just for the solos, but the solo is the voice for a little while. And not having that element on St. Anger was somewhat — I don’t want to say ‘boring’ — but it made the album pretty one-dimensional.”
Martin Barre
“Whether I’m playing a difficult chord or a very rhythmic part, then that’s as demanding as a solo would be. I never let up and I take pride in every note I play. It’s the way I look at music. I like to listen beyond the top line, I like to listen beyond the solo. You can listen to one piece 20 or 50 times and there’s always something new because there’s so much in there.”
Frank Zappa
“It depends on what the song is; very rarely are [my solos] first-take things. But they aren't things where I’d sit down and work out the whole solo in advance before I played it. I can’t do that, I can’t remember it. Usually what I do if I get something going, I’ll lay down 20 bars or so, and stop the tape, back it up, and punch in, and take up where I left off. I try to have the event that’s going on the record make musical sense and fit in with what's going on; because a record is a fixed object, it doesn’t change. It’s not a song anymore, it’s an object. If you’re playing a song on the road it can change every night. It can be something, it comes alive each time you play it, and it has its own existence. But once you’ve committed it to wax, it never changes. So if you’re going to leave your guitar solo on, you’re stuck with that for the life of the record. I’m fairly fussy about it, but I’m sure I let a few go out on record that I could probably do better now. But I hope that's the way it’s always going to be.”
Dimebag Darrell
“I think it’s getting a little bit more like that. For a while, people were like, ‘F*** guitar solos — they’re boring,’ but I never bought into any of that shit. And all the people that it was coming from were those dudes that play the seven-string guitars that could only play the top four strings. So I think everyone that’s into guitar playing has been screaming out for the last couple of years and now you see more dudes doing solos, or at least short little bits. But I’m not into the short bit thing — it almost seems like you’re putting it in there to say, ‘Look, I could do it if I wanted to.’ But that ain’t the truth — either you can fucking rip it or you can’t. I mean, what if Zakk Wylde put out a record and it had only two little short solo snippets? Dude, you would know that that ain’t right. You didn’t get the whole meal deal!”
Zakk Wylde
“Without a doubt, guitar solos are back again. There are a bunch of bands that are doing solos now. It is always one of those things where eventually what is old is new again. It is usually like a 20-year cycle. Even with fashion, or what people are wearing, music is the same thing. It is always funny when you see it. Do you know what I mean? I grew up on classic rock like Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen. There are only two types of music, the crap and the good.”