Beautiful Simple Guitar Solo in G major

Fingerpicking Guitar

Alright guys, welcome to another fingerstyle lesson from the “Fingerstyle Solo” Program. In this program we learn how to play simple melodies and guitar solo over a backing track.

Today I am going to show you a beautiful simple guitar solo in G major on fingerpicking guitar using G major pentatonic scale and G major scale.

It is a fairly short solo suitable for fingerstyle beginners who want to play along with a backing track and have fun learning simple solos.

You can have access to the tab and the backing track (with and without the metronome) so that you can practice and play the guitar solo exactly as I play it.

As always guys take things step by step and learn one melody at a time!

Learn more about the Pentatonic and G major scale in the article below.

Good luck!

Tab Available on Patreon!

Get the Tab here!

The Video

What is a Guitar Solo

A guitar solo is a melodic passage (also called instrumental or improvisation) played with a guitar (or any other instrument). We can find guitar solos in blues, swing, jazz, metal, rock and and gospel music. Almost any genre of music contains a guitar solo, instrumental or an improvisation.

The guitar solos are usually written in musical notation or guitar tabs.

Acoustic guitar solos can work for a single guitar playing chords and melodies or with accompaniment from other instruments or small ensembles such as guitar and bass, a band or even a simple backing track with a guitar playing chords.

Learn The Pentatonic Scale

In this simple guitar solo we are going to blend both the G major pentatonic scale and the G major scale in one box.

The Pentatonic scale is one of the most used scale in music. One of the reasons why everybody uses this scale has to do with its simplicity and musicality. Beginners can easily learn the pentatonic scale and within hours create a simple guitar solo that sounds great!

The concept is really simple! The Pentatonic scale is a bunch of notes form the major scale. The difference is that the Major scale is 7 notes, the Pentatonic scale only has 5, from its name Penta.

Overall the Pentatonic scale makes the life of everybody easy! It is easy to memorize and put into practice. With just few notes you are already creating a beautiful simple solo.

G major Pentatonic scale

The G major scale has the notes G A B D E G.

There are five different shapes but we will only focus on one box.

Below check the difference between the G Pentatonic Scale and the G Major scale.

There are many shapes to pentatonic scales; this example of the black keys was just one to make the observation easy because it is really practical. If you don’t have a keyboard in home, don’t be desperate, we will explain in details how to create this scale.

Backing Track and Chord Progression

In this program you can play along with a backing track.

The chord progression in the key of G major goes as follows: G – G/B and C add9.

One of the simple thing about this chord progression is that it is perfect to play along with using the Pentatonic scale and the major scale.

If we break down the note of each chord, you can see why!

The G major triad has G B D. The G/B has exactly the same notes as the G and the Cadd9 has C D E G.

If we compare the notes of the chords with the G pentatonic scale G A B D E G we notice that the majority of the notes coming from the pentatonic scale are the same as the chords. For this reason the pentatonic scale will work perfectly with this chord progression.