WayLoop guides
How to learn a guitar solo by ear, one phrase at a time
The way to learn a solo by ear is to stop treating it as a solo. Split it into phrases of a few seconds, loop one at a time at a speed where you can hear every note, and only move on when you can play it along with the record. This works for any instrument and for voice.
1. Listen before you touch the instrument
Play the solo through a few times and sing it, even badly. You're learning its shape: where it climbs, where it rests, which notes last. If you can hum a phrase, your fingers have a target.
2. Split it into phrases
Most solos breathe like speech. Find the gaps and mark them. In WayLoop, M drops a marker on the waveform, so you can come back to each phrase without hunting for it.
3. Loop one phrase, slowly
Loop just the first phrase and slow it to 50 or 60%, with the pitch unchanged. Press L at its start and L again at its end, or tap A and B on iPhone and iPad. If the phrase has one hard bar, loop only that bar. S saves a loop for tomorrow.
If you're new to this, read how to slow down a song without changing its pitch.
4. Find the first note, then the next one
Match the first note on your instrument, then the second. Don't guess the whole phrase at once. When a run is too fast to separate, slow that loop further for a moment: you're listening now, not playing along.
Check your tuning first, or nothing will match. If the recording is tuned down, shift it by a semitone rather than retuning. Older recordings can sit between two notes, and a few cents of fine-tuning fixes that.
5. Play along, then raise the speed
Once you have the notes, play with the loop until it feels easy at that speed. Then raise it by about 5% and repeat. If it falls apart, go back one step. A metronome helps when the phrase rushes in the same place each time.
6. Record yourself
You hear yourself differently when you aren't busy playing. Record a take over the track, listen back, and compare your bends and timing with the original. WayLoop's Recorder keeps your takes with the song.
7. Join the phrases
Learn the second phrase the same way, then loop across the join between them. The joins are where a learned solo usually breaks, so give them their own loop.
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