Originally Posted by: Kasperow
...but what scales would you use for the two progressions? I'm solely asking out of curiousity because I'm not sure about how to pick scales for solos...

Honestly, I suck at theory... I'm really not good at seeing a chord progression in writing, and then saying "this scale will sound good here, these notes will sound great there etc..."

What I do instead is listen to the music, and try to hear the notes in my head first. When I start getting some ideas, I'll start playing around until I have enough notes that I can figure out what scale I'm using. Don't get me wrong, if on my BOSS JS10 the song I bring up says "Am" for the key, then sure, I'll start with Am and play around with that for a bit. But I'm always listening and letting my ears be the guide. For example, for one tune I ended up using A Aeolian and A Dorian in the same lick... it just worked over the music. Right after that, technically speaking, I was playing in A Pentatonic Minor (sounds fancy...oooo three scales now being used, but really, the pentatonic minor part was just my way of avoiding notes I didn't want to use for that part). All that was natural for me; I could "hear" the notes before playing them, and it didn't really matter to me what scale/mode I was using. After that, just for fun, I came up with a riff in A Phrygian... so, all flowing together in one sequence... A Dorian, to A Aeolian, to A Pentatonic Minor, to A Phrygian... BUT the Phrygian part really stands out from the rest.. you might listen to it and go "ugh, that doesn't sound that great.." or you might really like it... just comes down to personal taste. But it definitely wasn't a natural process for me to add the Phrygian element... I had to play around with the scale until I found something that fit, so that part was more "forced" if you want to call it that.

So, if you can figure it out what scales and notes to use before hand, great, but if not, I'd suggest just experimenting until you find something that really fits... just my two cents. The end justifies the means... in other words, doesn't matter how you arrive at what you come up with so long as your satisfied with it.