A Helpful Six-Note Method That Teaches Beginners How Play a Guitar Solo In Only Five Minutes

Guitarist Steve Stine of GuitarZoom offers a really helpful way to help beginning guitarists grasp the basics of guitar soloing. Calling it the six-note method, Stine patiently explained how to find the lowest note in an open chord, how to find that note on the low E string and then how to find the six notes that will allow the player to play a respectable solo. He also urged that those learning to have patience with themselves and fun with the guitar.

When I first teach people how to solo, it’s not that you have to know a bunch of licks and things like that. The first thing you need to do is, you just need to learn how to what I call meander, which is just moving around playing those notes in different orders with different rhythms. This is a good place to start, and believe me when you get really good at playing guitar and you learn how to solo really well, you’re still going to use this technique. You’re just going to use lots of other techniques as well. But movement is something that we need, so it’s not like you have to feel like you can’t do this because you didn’t learn how to do this or you don’t know the notes on the guitar or you don’t know your theory. Don’t worry about all that stuff. You’ll learn all that. Right now the most important thing is you have some fun with this.

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.