Most guitarists can’t make their guitar playing sound emotional for these reasons:

Reason One: They have not tried to improve their creativity as an actual skill. Instead, they can only be as creative as the licks they have memorized.

Reason Two: They don’t know how to integrate their musical skills together properly. Technical skill and musical know-how are useless until you can do this.

Once you have moved past these problematic issues, playing amazing guitar solos will be totally easy.

The following is the most effective way to play/improvise awesome guitar solos (in six steps):

Step One: Determine The Emotion You Want To Convey In Your Guitar Solo

Creative guitar solos that have tons of feeling and passion begin by first understanding the emotion you want others to feel. This is the foundation to everything else below.

Step Two: Turn That Emotion Into Sound

There is a unique sound that can express any feeling you want to produce with your guitar playing. So whenever you determine the emotion you want to create, all that is left is for your ears to identify the sound that matches with it.

Watch this video to see how to turn any emotion you feel into a specific sound:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/EaG9YEAND-M

Step Three: Determine The Notes You Must Play To Create The Sound You Hear

Once you have used your ears to find the sound you want, your level of understanding with music theory will give you the ability to know which note is required to make this sound. Of course, music theory is not what most people think... just a bunch of rules and guidelines for how music should be made.

Watch this video about music theory to learn what it is truly all about, plus how it helps you to play expressive guitar solos:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1G506EquzM

Step Four: Locate The Correct Notes On Your Guitar

As soon as you have determined which notes you want to play, you’ll need to find those notes on the fretboard very quickly. To do this, you must improve fretboard visualization. Fretboard visualization does NOT mean memorizing the letter names of the notes on guitar. It actually refers to the following skill: knowing how to quickly find chords, arpeggios and scales in any key signature + any location of the guitar. Almost no one actually works on this, but those who do make insanely fast progress towards becoming killer lead guitarists. Check out the video below to learn how to practice fretboard visualization with scales:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/tBWNQZptHXg

Step Five: Play The Notes On Your Guitar Using Total Accuracy And Fluency

Tons of people start at this step (by playing notes), although they completely skipped all the prior steps without knowing it. By doing this, your fingers can only function on autopilot, taking away your ability to think creatively. This makes it nearly impossible to play expressive and creative guitar solos.

Keeping this in mind, having solid guitar technique is crucial to being able to effortlessly play whatever notes/emotions you hear in your head. Once you have developed great guitar technique, it will be infinitely easier to accurately express emotion in your guitar playing on a consistent basis.

Check out the video below and learn how to integrate advanced lead guitar technique into melodies to make your solos sound a lot more emotional:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/UOD-n-RXuSc

Step Six: Express Every Note With Maximum Emotion

As soon as you know which notes you need to play... don’t just play them, use them to express as much emotion as you can! This is done by focusing on HOW you play the notes you play, and by squeezing everything you can out of each one.

To see how to do this for yourself, download this free resource about playing emotional guitar licks .

The Main Difference Between Virtuoso Guitar Players And Everybody Else:

Virtuoso guitar players go through all six of the steps above in the blink of an eye second. For them, there is simply no delay between selecting an emotion to express and actually expressing it. This exact same process completed again and again until the solo is done.

A lot of people leave out several steps from above or have a difficult time completing them fast enough to express themselves with total accuracy. These issues occur because they haven’t learned how to integrate their skills together (or they simply haven’t mastered certain skills on their own yet).

To be able to play killer guitar solos anytime you pick up your guitar, you’ll have to go through each step of the process and master it (until every step is totally mastered). Unless you have done this, you will always struggle to yourself at the level you want to. To achieve this goal fast, work together with an expert guitar teacher who has already taught hundreds of other guitarists how to do this for themselves. This will save you countless hours of frustration, and help you to master guitar in less time than you ever thought possible.

To learn how to add much more emotion into your playing, download this free online resource about playing emotional guitar licks .

Author's Bio: 

About The Author:

Tom Hess is a professional touring musician, composer and successful rock/metal guitar teacher. He helps guitarists around the world learn to play guitar online . On his website tomhess.net , you can find guitar playing tips , free guitar resources and more guitar articles .