About the Difficulty Levels
These are written for grade 8 level, but it wouldn’t hurt a grade 5-7 player to try them at the slower speeds. The PDF file in the key of F# minor is the one that fits with the song ‘Lead Sheet’ from the Grade 8 guitar 2012-18 Rockschool syllabus.
Guitar Tab and creative concepts for preparing the faster parts of the guitar solo for the 2012-18 Rockschool Grade 8 piece “Lead Sheet”
These exercises came about from preparing for the guitar solo in the 2012-2018 Rockschool Grade 8 piece “Lead Sheet”. They are not endorsed by Rockschool in any way, but they are designed to help players with ideas of the types of things they could do for this solo – which is entirely from my perspective, as a guitar teacher with 5 years teaching experience.
These 5 exercises are meant to build up your speed for shred style rock solos, which would also work with metal, as the Lead Sheet song is based on a lot of ‘Nu-Metal’ artists, as cited in the book.
You will need to remember that this is a series of 2 bar exercises, and for the “Lead Sheet” song, you will need to prepare an 8 bar solo. Please do not copy these exercises verbatim and stick them together for the exam, but you could draw inspiration from the ideas and make them your own. Remember to build an interesting guitar solo (one that will score the most marks), it needs to ‘tell a story’ rather than ‘filling the air with a thousand notes’, but it does need to show off a competant level of speed and techniques at this level. You need to be musical, and like the example on Track 5 of the CD, the guitarist makes it musical. It has plenty of the fast sextuplet shredding style, but it also has some slower 16th note groovy soloing, which sounds a little funky too. As a whole, the solo seems to be modeled on Tom Morello’s style (Rage Against The Machine), so for more ideas along those lines, go check their music out – they have plenty of guitar solos in their back catalogue.