Top 4 CCM Guitar Solos of All Time

Hi fam,

There is a danger in mindlessly practicing scales and drills over and over with no musical goal. Trust me, I've done that for years. You can get burnt out on practice and still have nothing musical to show for all your work. With that in mind, I recently decided to not practice guitar chops or exercises for their sake only. Instead, I took a casual vow to learn songs and guitar solos as a way of improving my chops. That led to the four solos in this video, but first, I think you might need a little insight into my musical history.

When I was growing up, I was only really exposed to four styles of music until I started to play the guitar at about the age of 12 or 13. Those four types of music were Oldies (50s and 60s), 80s and 90s Adult Contemporary (think Michael Bolton or Peter Cetera), Southern Gospel, and Contemporary Christian Music. I didn’t know it at the time, but the guitar solos in some of those CCM tunes from back then really had an impact on me.

Fast-forward to a few years ago. I’m a pretty big Megadeth fan. One day I was listening to their Cryptic Writings album. I noticed that it sounded quite different from all of their other albums, so I decided to look up who produced it. It ended up being a guy named Dan Huff. I’d never heard of him before, so I looked him up. It turns out that he has played on or produced a mountain of albums from the 80s to today.

As I was reading through Dan Huff’s discography, I discovered that he was the guy who played nearly every single CCM guitar solo that I liked throughout the years. I thought that was pretty cool, so I decided to do a Top 4 CCM guitar solos video. Turns out it was really my Top 4 Dan Huff guitar solos video.

Anyways, I ended up learning these solos to improve my guitar chops and ended up having something cool and musical to show for it. If you are struggling with just playing scales or exercises over and over again, try this. Pick three or four guitar solos or songs you’d love to be able to play and dig into them. It took me about 4-5 weeks to get these solos down, but it was worth every second. I feel like I improved a lot more than I would have if I had just practiced scales and drills over and over again.

Here are the artists and songs in the video.

4 - Michael W. Smith - "Emily"

3 - Steven Curtis Chapman - "Heaven In The Real World"

2 - Amy Grant - "That's What Love is For"

1 - Michael W. Smith - "Place in This World"

Thanks for reading, watching, and listening,

Nate

P.S. I plan on realizing a lot more easy song lessons as well as some more solo videos like this pretty soon. The latest premium course is also very closed to being released!