How The Pros Solo on Acoustic Guitar 

Thanks for the hang, good luck to all those looking to learn how to not hate soloing on acoustic!

Django is screaming from his grave

A solo done right on an acoustic is the most beautiful thing ever. So unforgiving.

David Rawlings is the master of acoustic soloing. Electric soloing technique doesn’t translate very well to acoustic but conversely acoustic soloing techniques work extremely well when applied to electric and are a great way to get out of your personal box and offer more to the listener.

It’s bluegrass music. Dem boys been doing this for years. Thanks for bringing it up guys.

Celtic guitar also utilises a lot of open strings when playing and soloing, it works really well for the instrument. It also suits more melodic solos in my opinion. Prime example being Lindsay Buckingham's live solo s on the Fleetwood Mac song Landslide.

Anyone here heard Clapton’s Unplugged? It’s the perfect counter-example of the video’s title. (edit: or Al di Meola / Paco de Lucia / John Mclaughlin's Guitar Trio album... and so many others...)

Tony Rice: Backwaters...the entire album. You can definitely solo with authority on an acoustic guitar.,

One of the biggest takeaways from this video for me is about not resting your forearm on the guitar and holding the body of the guitar away from your body to allow it to resonate. Wow, that is a huge tip. Been playing acoustic since I was 8 and I am 54 this year and it never dawned on me. I've always been looking to get better acoustic tone. Wow, thank you Rhrett & Steve. Great video!

Clapton Unplugged is a master class in acoustic soloing (slide/nylon/steel). It’s all there, melodic, soulful and serves the song/performance. Tim Reynolds work on Dave Matthews Live at Luther College is also incredible.

I was like, "Wow, is that samuraiguitarist?" It is!

To call me a novice would be giving me far more credit then I deserve. Two profound things I learned from this video were how much more the open strings ring out than the fretted strings. The other was when Sam played and pressed his finger against the guitar and let off. I never would have thought I would be able to hear a difference. I'm sure most real guitarist know these things but I found it fascinating. Thanks Rhett for a great video

One thing that I find key to soloing on an acoustic is landing phrases on the beat. You can noodle around more freely on an electric, but for an acoustic where you don't have that kind of volume and sustain, it helps to have the support of the rhythm section especially when you hit a first or last note of a phrase. (It's pretty good on electric solos, too.)

"What is this, a crossover episode?" Cool to see 2 channels I like collaborating

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="28">0:28</a> main reason for the "plinky" sound is the right hand technique. If you want more "body" and attack it's worth to practice "rest stroke" technique, very often used in gypsy jazz. A friend of mine showed me the difference it makes in sound, and it was almost like he was playing a different instrument. Joscho Stephan is one of the greatest in that realm.

For having to fall to a backup plan, your basement studio looks great in these shots.

This was fun to watch. Well done you guys!

Justin Johnson does it pretty good.

It's so good to see Sammy G on the channel! Awesome seeing a collaboration with you both, as you guys have helped my musical journey in a huge way the past couple years. Much love and support!

Mad respect for these two guys.

That was so informative! I had never seen that technique demonstrated before. Really helpful.

Great work guys!

Epic stuff fellas! Thanks!! As someone who enjoys both the electric and acoustic side this was great info to think about and focus on doing in each soloing

Honestly I love the combination of SammyG and Rhett haha

Wow, this is great.

Excellent content. Thank you both.🙏🏼🙏🏼

The tone on that slope shoulder is throaty and rich! I love it, very nice.

Two of my faves in the same spot. Perfect! Good video gents.

Great jam session with soloing, clearly a lot of influences from Bluegrass and also Trad Irish and Scottish Folk tunes. As a Brit who loves Traditional Folk from various parts of the UK I can find a lot of inspiration from this. Cheers 🍻 chaps.

@samuraiguitarist is among the realest, glad to see Steve here. Great tones, brothers

Great collab Rhett! Thx Sam too! Learned a ton.Thanks for posting!

It's just a joy watching two great guitar players trade techniques on acoustic guitars!

Lovely stuff, guys. Getting big Dave Rawlings vibes. Rhett: do a feature on Dave Rawlings! One of the only guitarists I've seen live who gets gasps during solos and rapturous applause every time he finishes one! That concept of creating a story out of your solo is huge, and, Dave is a master of it. Keep up the great work: big fan of you both. Awesome collab!

Thanks For Having SamG on. Love your channel and Samuris channel. Its great to see you together.

Matthew Scott ‘where you been’ has got an awesome acoustic solo in the middle of a mostly electric guitar song. Second only to Turin brakes Underdog. Oh and maybe the goat more than words with the longer outro. Nuno always the man.

Man, this is a great collaboration.

Leo Kottke...nuff said

Good stuff!

I think of guys like Clapton and Gilmore and my memory comes back to solos I've seen and heard them play. They do it with finesse and grace. Sparsely often. Licks and stuff are short and concise and theres breathing room before the next phrase. (eg Wish you were here)

Great playing, great content. This becoming my go to guitar channel.

Great video!

Two of my favorite guitarists of all time are Michael Hedges and Tim Reynolds. The 1st time I heard each of their music, I was in as much awe as when anyone heard Eddie play "Eruption" before everyone else started copying him. It's kinda bittersweet that they never caught on as much as VH did.

Great sounding Eastman guitar..pretty, too. Thanks for upload. Some good ideas here . 👍🏽

Great video Guys!

Great advice here. It brings out the music in the acoustic guitar.

Great info, many electric players also allow too much string noise when playing acoustic. The open string emphasis helps a lot with that.

Hey that was great man, thanks!

Just to be the next to be with you was pretty epic. Especially that low e pop!

Always treat watching Rhett’s videos with headphones on

Found this really useful - thanks!

Great topic👍

Tim Renwick on Al Stewart's Year of the Cat. fabulous acoustic solo segues to a fabulous electric solo

Brilliant needed this…been struggling with acoustic solos and chasing electric sounds…

Dynamic Duo!

Great video. Subbed to both 👍 really enjoyed this

Love it 😊

I heard a big click as I was watching this video and it was the sound of the lightbulb in my head coming on. Thank you for posting this! I have always hated soloing on acoustic and now I realize that my approach was all wrong. This is so simple, yet, I've never had somebody tell me this. Thanks, Guys!

Listen to the solo in Taste I'm moving on. Sounds awesome. 😄

Great stuff there Axemen

1000% an acoustic and electric are NOT the same, even hybrids! I like both, but being an old fart, I started in the early 70's with acoustics and while I love all the wonderful and creative sounds I can make with my electrics, I respect my acoustics for what they enhance in my ever going, never stop learning, guitar journey. Kudos to this video, respect the instrument you are playing!

Slide and flamenco solos are some of my favorite

Hey camera man , STAY STILL UR MAKING US DIZZY

Hi boys, listen to Michael Hedges, Mike Dawes and Tommy Emanuel and it‘s like the sunrise, a phantastic world full of acoustic music!

This was great! One solution for soloing on an acoustic guitar without reworking your technique too much...play an Ovation. Feel and attack and therefore I would say results are much closer to an electric guitar. You can move much faster on an Ovation. If it is set up you can play the licks you play on an electric (excluding Hendrix and Van Halen, though if you can play Spanish Fly, you probably can disregard this caveat). Ovation also projects differently than a traditional acoustic. Try it.

More please❤

Cool! Glad you did this. I had this aha moment when I moved to Kentucky and sought out a jam. Someone starts something like Big Sciota. Then they each take 16 bar (NO MORE!) breaks improvising around the basic tune. They weren’t anything but everyday folk, maybe the occasional musician from Nashville, but just folks with good ears and hands. Watch some videos of these folks. Go to the local Bluegrass jam. There is a lot to learn. $20 sounds a bargain

Great video. One of my favorites in the genre is the acoustic solos in Pure Prairie League Amie. I think a good example of "how to".

Thanks for mentioning what I thought was the obvious; when in doubt, play the melody. That has always been my fall back strategy. Good video.

always liked the first half of free bird (acoustic part)…open strings being played between the chords…a nice touch by whoever played it…

Days of the New had some awesome acoustic soloing. "Touch, Peel, and Stand" and "Shelf in the Room" both come to mind.

Your electric playing will transfer over to acoustic if you restring it with electric guitar strings (11's). Also drill holes into the side of the body to get the "boominess" out of them. The midrange introduced from the side sound holes will completely change the instrument's sound profile making it more percussive and tight.

I Love Sammy G! So glad he was coming through and you guys got a good video together lol! Would love to see more collabs of you all! He should of came down for that Bike Festival to jam with Josh Scott lol!!

Great points raised here about the different characteristics of acoustic versus electric playing. You guys should check out Jonathan Stout (a/k/a Campus Five) to see how to approach the acoustic guitar without relying so much on open strings; i.e., in a jazz setting.

John Mayer's Queen of California acoustic solo is a prime example of how to solo on an acoustic guitar. Same with his Something Like Olivia

Love to see Eastman getting some love!!

The bit from <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="580">9:40</a> is just straight up beautiful.

Nice tips here. I do like the sound of a piezo pickup acoustic solo

Daryl Stuermer on a Jean-Luc Ponty tune called Renaissance . Emotive af

I only do solos on an acoustic guitar, because I think there’s something lost in transition while playing on an electric guitar through amp and that said, the main tip to a good sound on an acoustic is to use a correct guitar pick for the style in question. Myself I have tree choices: for high treble attack I use 0.53 thickness Jim Dunlop nylon, and for smoother sound I use Jazz III and for the BEST sound I use my five fingers!

Excellent video. When producing, I would ask guitarists that play constantly solo notes if they talk that way. That would trigger them to think about taking "breaths" in their solos. Thanks for putting this together. Ya'll need to put out a dual acoustic album in this style. I would listen to this all day.

I play acoustic but in a blues/ trad jazz contest. I find very useful using mainly downstrokes when solo, so I can focus more on tone and I cannot do fast stuff lol

The first regular paying gigs I had were playing Celtic folk and purely acoustic for a dinner crowd, no amp or mics, my guitar was a vintage arch top ,so you have to learn how to fill all the air , open strings and capo letting strings interact with each other like a harp type cascade

I have the other issue, i can solo on acoustic guitar from years of crosspicking flatpicking, but i’ve learned over many years, i need to set up my electric more like my acoustic - and bring that style to the electric… because thats what sounds the best for me. So i use very low action, same gauge as martin lights - 12-54 wound g, and just slide around more vs bending over a 1/2 step. Works for me but never met a guy doing that… my realization… i had to give myself permission to do it - byt julian lage has played that gauge, so i knew it could sound great if your mind is in it

I've always thought this was an interesting topic. I could never think of a good acoustic solo. Until that is, I heard old shoes (& picture postcards) by Tom Waits one day. Shep cooke plays an absolutely beautiful solo on acoustic guitar for that song, one of the best I've heard. I think that's the basis for a good solo on an acoustic, simple great feel, and not at all flashy

Thanks for this video Rhett. And yes to open strings! After 4 years on the acoustic and learning scale patterns I almost never use, I've started learning scales that use open strings. It has left me with a big question, why is it with all the guitar RU-vid videos out there very few talk about or teach learning scales and riffs closest to the nut?

There is a great acoustic guitar solo in Make Me Smile by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel that I think spans the electric and acoustic cross over point. And No Doubt's Don't Speak also has a great solo. They are out there if we hunt around.

Great video. There comes a point in most electric guitarists learning where you drift over to acoustic and discover that although they have the same 6 strings, tunings, and general theory, they therefor SHOULD be the same - they aren't. (I'm sure this occurs in the opposite direction for those who begin acoustic and pick up electric too). It's my belief that if you can learn both you will be a much more flexible player and enjoy playing that much more because your scope for creativity is suddenly widened. I've been playing electric on and off 40+ years, but I only started playing acoustic seriously in lock-down and it blew away all the apathy and general boredness I was feeling at the time, and I'm now almost acoustic only. And for goodness sake don't think that playing oldey-timey tunes on an acoustic is naff, because some of it is hard as hell and it WILL expand your abilities.

Good advice and beautiful playing. For a study on the differences look at Richard Thompson.

Max Willow fingerpicking a guitar is like listening to heaven as the clouds briefly part after a rain

Totally agree with Sammy G. Acoustic guitars and electric guitars are as different as pianos and organs are, maybe even more. They're different instruments. John Mayer's 2012 Performances EP has some great examples of acoustic guitar solos on it (that version of Queen of California comes to mind specifically). Individual note runs need help on acoustic guitars, 100%

I like that banjo killer!

The best advice I ever got (especially for approaching a fiddle tune like Big Sciota that they were playing here, although it applies to breaks over vocal tunes here): Play the melody. Or at least play the bones of it. You can improvise and throw in hot licks, but ultimately you want the listener to be able to tell what tune you're playing over.

Rhett, if you have not heard " I was only joking " by Rod Stewart, give it a listen. The acoustic solo translons to electric. It was knockout for us in the 70's. Knock if you will but I used an Ovation and it's the only guitar I wish I still had. My 63 stat that I have had from new is still with thankfully. Cheers mate.

😱 two of my favourite RU-vid guitarists on one video ❤️

Listen to Willie Nelson

Pat Flynn did a lot of bending in his solos in New Grass Revival. He accepted that he couldn't play like Tony Rice and came up with something that worked for him.

Billy mf Strings

That eastman sounds good

Really hope you guys go down in history. Some of the most beautiful picking I've ever heard! Thank you. 🙏

Great video, and i dig watching you both quite a bit! Do have to agree there may be a bit of naivete, but I wonder have you guys started on electric? Im mostly totally an acoustic player and have my whole concept of soloing rought from acoustic. Funny thing is, i just got my first strat electric and leaning to solo electric now lol. Been a process for sure. You guys can for sure rip it on acoustic too! But yea, to add to this list of crazy acoustic players throw on that Tommy Emmanuel and Billy Strings vid and see that insanity.