Modal Soloing What You Are Missing!

Soloing over a modal background can in many ways be more difficult than playing over
a song with changes. The main reason being that if the chords are moving, you can fall
back on that to introduce something new in the solo while you just follow the changes.
When you solo over a one chord vamp you have to work harder to make variations and
keep the listeners attention.

This lesson is introducing some techniques and aspects that you can use to create more
interesting modal solos.

Connect your phrases

The first two are melodic approaches that should help you keep the solo as a long story
instead of a random set of phrases over one chord.

Motifs
Using motifs and motif development is a great way to play melodies that for the listener
sounds recognizable and if you develop them also as evolving melodies that tell a story.

Using motifs has been a part of music since we started playing music. Think about the
5th symphony of Beethoven or the music from the Star wars films to have an idea about
what motifs sound like in music.

Call-Response
Call-response is probably something you already know from blues music. Thinking like
that when playing a solo can be very useful. In the solo in the video I am using different
registers to separate the question and answers of the melody. Of course you can do other
things as well, like alternating lines and chords or different types of phrasing.

The main advantage is that you listen to what you just played, and then try to come up
with a response to that. In that way it is a great exercise to connect your lines.

Adding variation to your solo

You have to be able to connect you lines and make the solo flow in a natural way
without sounding like a collection of random bits and pieces. But you also need to make
sure that everything does not sound the same, because that is boring as well.

In this next part of the video I talk about some ideas that you can use to vary how you
approach the solo. Of course the list of options for this is almost endless, so I just took
out a few that I found useful. Feel free to add come up with your own.

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In the solo where I demonstrate this I try to demonstrate how you can have melodies
which are very scale like and as a contrast you can have phrases that have a lot of large
intervals. The two sound very different, and if you are doing one for a long time in a
solo then the effect can be quite dramatic when you change.

Phrase Length
Using different lengths of phrases is a nice way to have a sort of melodic tension and
release in your solo. In my solo the alternates between short stabbing phrases and longer
phrases that really sit in the groove.

Syncopation
Using rhythm to create different feels in a solo is also a great tool. In the solo that I play
in the video I first state a motif that I play a few times in the groove and then almost
completely syncopate it. This way of taking a melody and then first having it in the
groove and then taking it away from the groove. You can of course use rhythm in many
ways but the idea of tension and release is often overlooked.