Originally Posted by Doug Young
To make solos more interesting...learn lots of licks, copy others off records. It's like learning to talk
- music is a language.
You don't learn how to carry on an interesting conversation by studying the dictionary or learning to diagram sentences (do they still do that?) You learn by developing a vocabulary, and coming up with ideas worth talking about, mostly by listening to other people and then carrying on conversations. In music, you can do that by tearing apart solos you like and trying to incorporate the licks into your own solos. One of the more useful pieces of advice I've run across was in an old Guitar Player, a Lee Ritenour column, I think. He suggested you take a simple lick from a record, a new one every day. Learn to play it in all 12 keys, play it backwards, play it fast, play it slow. Try to play it over different chords and see where it can fit. Change to be minor, or major, change around notes, turn it inside out. You'll generate like a 100 licks from that one idea. Do that every day for a while, and you'll soon have a "vocabulary", thousands of licks that all blend together in a way that you no longer even know where they came from, and you won't sound like you've copied licks, you'll sound like you. Good solos are melodies, so its more about being able to come up with melodies - practice singing something, and playing it, so you can play the melodies you hear in your head, and aren't just playing notes out of some scale pattern.
On a more mechanical note, it helps to learn chord construction, and know the chord tones [edit/add: tones and INTERVALS] If you are playing over an Am, know that the chord notes are A, C, E. Those are the safe notes that will sound right with that chord. Everything else is extensions of that or passing tones. You can play anything, all 12 notes, and you can justify how they fit over that chord. An A is the root, a B is the 2nd or 9th, the C is the 3rd, D is the 4th, E the 5th and so on. Any note you name, can be considered an extension of the chord. A#/Bb? that's a flat 9 and so on. The only thing that matters is that you know what that note will sound like over the chord and that you can play it when that's the sound you want to hear. Various scales are nothing more than collections of subsets of the 12 available notes. They're handy for being able to memorize and play fast, and some "packages" of these notes can have a certain sound, so you can call them up instead of having to think about each note individually. But ultimately, it's about being able to "have something to say", a combination of hearing things and being able to translate it to the guitar and having that "vocabulary", collections of licks and patterns you can draw on, just like you can pull out little phrases without even thinking about it when you talk.
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