How to craft the perfect guitar solo according to John Mayer
If you’re a guitarist, chances are you’ve been working on perfecting your soloing skills for some time now. Honing those Hendrixian bends is a labour of love, but at times it can feel like bashing your head against a wall. Thank God there are people out there willing to lend a helping hand. Take John Mayer for example, who recently offered his thoughts on what makes a perfect guitar solo.
During a conversation with Total Guitar, Mayer was asked if he had come across a formula for crafting show-stopping guitar lines. As you would expect, the guitarist was tickled by the very idea. While he couldn’t offer us anything as reliable as an equation, he did provide some helpful tips. “I think pitch, repetition, motif, all these things have a lot to do with which parts of your emotional map a solo is hitting at any given time,” he began. “I mean, if you start high, there’s nowhere left to go, right? So I see it as building a ramp.”
To illustrate his point, Mayer referenced the masterful guitar playing of Grateful Dead member Jerry Garcia: “When I was really diving deep into the Jerry stuff, getting ready for Dead & Company, I realized he was just brilliant at it,” Mayer says. “And another guy who’s brilliant at it is Doyle Bramhall [Doyle Bramhall II].”
In Mayer’s eyes, Doyle, who has worked with everyone from Eric Clapton to Roger Waters, is the best soloist around when it comes to “getting you to lean in,” as he puts it. “It’s a masterclass every single time,” Mayer continued. “First he whispers at you with his guitar: ‘Hey, I wanna tell you something…’ And you go, ‘What? What do you wanna tell me?’ And he goes, ‘I wanna tell you about this…’ And you’re in. He’ll be on the third go-round before he’s ever really pressed on the gas. He might do six go-rounds before he’s even thought about his heart rate going up. If you or I did that, we’d be circling the runway the last three.”
He added: “So Doyle’s just a monster that way, and I think about Doyle’s playing a lot in that respect: When you’re playing a solo, state your case. If you want to state it again, you will be embellishing that motif again. You have another thing you want to say? Well, maybe now, as you start to explain yourself, you have a little more emotion because you’re amping yourself up in your argument.” Mayer laughs. “And then maybe by the end you get to swear, if you want to swear.”
Mayer’s advice points to another, frequently unspoken aspect of good soloing, which is that the guitarist needs to serve the song as a whole and not perform in isolation. “The song has to pick back up after the solo, so you have to land the jump into the last chorus,” said Mayer. “Now, outros are different. You can build a ramp to the moon on the outro if you want, because you have a little something called the fade-out to save you. But otherwise, you have these two set ends. And that to me has always been a really interesting, and sometimes challenging, process of a solo.”
