Guitar Soloing 101 – An Easy Guide to the Fingerboard – Marcy Marxer

Anyone can learn to solo on the guitar! Even if you’re a novice, as long as you know your basic chords, you can start playing melodies and improvising lead parts. Marcy Marxer’s user-friendly method brings all the notes, frets and strings into clear focus, giving you an invaluable roadmap to the guitar fingerboard.

Marcy has successfully taught this foolproof method at guitar camps and workshops across the country. She provides both practical exercises and theoretical knowledge to demystify the guitar for learning players. Starting with warm-up exercises to isolate and strengthen your fingers, you’ll learn to play with proper hand position and learn to build pick accuracy and speed. Marcy then shows how to play scales horizontally (up the neck) and vertically (across the strings), and provides easy ways to find the notes anywhere on the guitar neck.

You’ll learn to pick out simple tunes like Frere Jacques, London Bridge and Will the Circle Be Unbroken. Marcy shows you how to hear each melody note in terms of intervals, where it lies on the scale, and its place in a chord. Adding passing tones, slides and other ornaments start to make your melodies come alive. Before long you’ll be improvising a blues, a swing tune (Lady Be Good), a fiddle tune (Chicken Reel) and a pop song (Tennessee Waltz).

This in-depth two-hour course imparts a huge amount of information that will take you from basics of improvisation to the intricacies of the CAGED system. As a bonus, Marcy and Cathy Fink provide rhythm backup so you can practice your new solos.