Reddit mentions of Chord Tone Soloing Private Lessons Series: A Guitarist's Guide to Melodic Improvising in Any Style (Musicians Institute: Private Lessons)

I think a beginner Jazz book would work. If you really want to learn these complex chords you need to drill them and play them a lot, so a jazz book would make sense.




Chord Tone Soloing by Barrett Tagliarino is a great book with a focus on learning arpeggios and scales. It doesn't really go beyond 7th chords but what you need to learn is the basics so you then can figure out chords on your own.

To understand chords you need to understand intervals and how they are laid out on the guitar: https://imgur.com/gallery/Fp4yV

Then you need to know which intervals different chords are constructed by: https://www.guitar.ch/en-us/guitar/chord_finder/chord_finder-chord-formula.html


Edit: I would say that if you choose to buy a chord/scales book then get one which shows intervals and not just black dots. Also, if it is repetitive- like showing a Fmaj barre chord and then a Gmaj barre chord with the same shape, it is basically useless. It doesn't present any new information, it's just the same thing shifted up two semitones.

There's a great book for this called Chord Tone Soloing by Barrett Tagliarino.


It's a really good guide to understanding and applying arpeggios, scales, and modes so that you can improvise lead parts that follow chord changes. Lots of good practical exercises to work on, and some solid theory information. As u/pigz said, it'll take a while to master, but if you can nail this it'll give you one of the most important lead guitar skills.

Great book I've just bought on this very subject - Chord Tone Soloing A Guitarist's Guide to Melodic Improvising in Any Style

I don't know if someone has already told you this, but I think what you might need to make it sound less random is a technique called "chord-tone targeting". It's basically all about having awareness of the individual notes in the chord so that you can add and emphasize those notes in the solo, which ties it to the progression.

It follows that if something sounds random than you need a little more structure. This doesn't hamper your creativity, it just narrows your focus. Great musicians can make the same three notes sound amazing despite playing them over and over again.

I also just play pentatonic and sound random, so this is something I have to study and work on as well. I bought two books, Chord-Tone Soloing and Guitarist's Guide To Scales Over Chords, which I think will help me and might also help you. Happy playing!

I had a lot of luck with this:

https://www.amazon.com/Chord-Tone-Soloing-Guitarists-Improvising/dp/0634083651

I had this issue.

https://www.amazon.com/Chord-Tone-Soloing-Guitarists-Improvising/dp/0634083651/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485559538&sr=8-1&keywords=chord+tone+soloing
https://www.amazon.com/Guitarists-Chords-Foundation-Melodic-Soloing/dp/1423483219/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1485559538&sr=8-6&keywords=chord+tone+soloing

These books (and a lot of very mindful practice) fixed that problem.