Guitar Solo - Rock Music

Rock Music

Even though guitar solos are used in a wide range of genres, the term guitar solo often refers specifically to the rock music genre. The dramatic, amplified electric guitar solo has become a characteristic part of rock music. Since the 1960s, electric guitarists have often altered the timbre of their guitar adding electronic guitar effects such as reverb, distortion, delay, and chorus to make the sound fuller and add harmonic overtones.

Rock bands often have two guitarists, designated 'lead' and 'rhythm', with the 'lead' player performing the solos while the 'rhythm' player accompanies with chords or riffs. Most examples of rock music are based around songs in very traditional forms. The main formal features are therefore verses, choruses, and bridges. The guitar solo is usually the most significant instrumental section of a mainstream rock song. In other rock-related genres, such as pop and dance music, the synthesizer usually plays this role.

This use of a guitar instrumental interlude in rock music has its roots in blues musicians such as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker. Ernest Tubb's 1940 honky tonk classic, "Walking the Floor over You" was the first "hit" recording to feature and highlight a solo by a standard electric guitar–though earlier hits featured electric lap steel guitars. Blues master Lonnie Johnson had also recorded at least one on electric guitar, but his innovation was neither much noted nor influential. These pioneers in turn influenced solos in rhythm and blues (e.g., Bo Diddley), rock and roll (e.g. Chuck Berry) and more recent forms of music.

In most cases, the rock guitar solo is a short instrumental section. In the classic verse-chorus form, it often falls between the second chorus and third verse. Extended guitar solos are sometimes used as a song's outro, such as Radiohead's "Paranoid Android", Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird", Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb", Guns N' Roses' "November Rain", Metallica's "Fade to Black", Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog", The Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil", Pearl Jam's "Alive", Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Dani California", Cream's "White Room", AC/DC's "Let There Be Rock", Outlaws' "Green Grass and High Tides", The Alan Parsons Project's "Eye in the Sky" and Eagles' "Hotel California". Solos can take place in the intro, such as "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" by Jimi Hendrix, "Since I've Been Loving You" by Led Zeppelin, "One" by Metallica, "Lazy" by Deep Purple, "I Want It All" by Queen, "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, "Don't Take Me Alive" by Steely Dan, "Raised on Rock by the Scorpions and "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd.

The use of guitar solos in heavy metal was notable during the 1980s, when rapid-fire "shredding" solos were common; a virtuostic lead guitarist of a band might be more well-known than the singer. During this time the use of techniques such as harmonics became more widely used. Later, guitarists who had developed considerable technical facility began to release albums which consisted only of guitar compositions. Guitar solos in popular music went out of fashion in the mid 1990s, coinciding with the rise in popularity of nu metal and grunge (note that nu metal differed significantly from previous subgenres of metal and grunge did not wholly abandon solos but simply do not feature them prominately), which do not feature guitar solos prominently. During this period, guitar solos became less prominent in many pop and popular rock music styles; either being trimmed down to a short four-bar transition or omitted entirely, in a vast departure from the heavy usage of solos in classic rock music from the '60s, '70s, '80s, and early '90s. Classic rock revival music heavily features soloing, along with classic rock bands that are still active, as of 2012.

Occasionally, there will be a 2-part guitar solo with both the rhythm and lead guitar taking solos. (e.g. "Master of Puppets" by Metallica), or dual solos with both lead and rhythm playing complementary solos such as with Black Sabbath's "War Pigs", Iron Maiden's Hallowed Be Thy Name, The Trooper and Metallica's "Four Horsemen", or Megadeth's "Mechanix".