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Writer's pictureDavid Paul

How to learn guitar solos by ear


In this post I will teach you how to learn guitar solos by ear. One of the things that is very helpful in learning guitar solos is having played and learning lots of songs especially songwriting. Through there practices, one is able to familiarize themselves with how notes, chords, scales and intervals sound both harmonically and melodically. This ear training also helps with the guitarist being able to play the notes that are inside their heads which is the ultimate goal for any player.


Having a great ear for a guitarist is also important to being able to play with other musicians. A guitarist being able to communicate how to play licks, riffs, chords through sound and being able to recite it back through their instrument is very important. This makes songwriting easier through ideas being able to be bounced back and taught faster and having a clear understanding of what the guitarist wants through pitches.


These practices are most often overlooked by the beginning and intermediate guitarist and with time have created their own ways of communicating their ideas to other musicians in a roundabout way. Most advanced musicians have a great wealth of theory knowledge but also have great ear musicianship skills. Again, the guitarists ultimate goal is to play the ideas that are inside one's head.


Aside from playing with other musicians, having a great ear can help a guitarist learn songs that are incorrectly tabbed or scored. The guitar is infamous for having inaccuracies in their works. The problem this arises is because most of the guitarists that write the music do not score it. Most of there storage of how to play something comes from memory recall. This leaves third party musicians to transcribe and notate what it is that they hear from the record. Sometimes the transcriptions are spot on, other times it seem that the transcriber is not as proficiently trained in that genre of music and does their best. This is completely unheard of in classical music.


Due to this, often times beginning and intermediate guitarists who rely heavily on tablature to learn music will often times not learning things correctly and wonder why what they are playing is not matching what the record sounds like.


When I teach, I do use tablature to teach my electric guitar students. What is nice about the tablature is that they come with rhythmic notations that I can read when teaching my student how to play with the correct rhythm. I learned how to count rhythm from music school and from learning classical guitar pieces. Even though I teach students the music through tabs I also cross reference the notation to my ear training on what I am listening to on the record. Often times I find mistakes in the transcriptions and or rhythm and since I have played the music before or familiar with the artist or style I am able to correct said mistakes so the student can learn it correctly and not have to fix things later down the line.


In this video, I am learning the two Metal Meltdown solos by K.K. Downing and Glen Tipton of Judas Priest. There are many inaccurate transcriptions available and also inaccurate covers of these solos on You Tube. My objective of this video was to show my musical process of how I learn a guitar solo from ear by scratch, no experience played before or existing knowledge of notes and share as much as I could in an hours time. Although there are a few parts that are a little hard for my ears to discern, I get very close to playing the solos note for note by the end.


It was also a great surprise and joy to see K.K. Downing give a like to this video and his press account to now follow me.


I hope you all enjoy the video! Link down below.

KK Downing's webmaster is following my Instagram account
KK Downing press account



KK Downing's official personal account liked this video
Official KK Downing

Please Follow my Instagram for daily content and if you follow my You Tube please Like the Videos, Hit the Bell and Subscribe.


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