How to Solo Over…Hotel California

The "Hotel California" chord progression can be challenging to improvise over, but we can find all the necessary pieces to do it from various Fret Science lessons. This 9-page PDF lesson pulls together pentatonic gear shifts, triad target overlays, and the harmonic minor and Phrygian dominant scales into a single lesson that will get you soloing melodically over this famous progression. Includes a backing track and links to related lessons.

This one isn't for the fainthearted, but if you've been following along with everything so far, it's a good one.

How to solo over…Hotel California

Some chord progressions are easier to improvise over than others, and some chord progressions can seem downright diabolical. But most chord progressions are solvable if we look at them through the right lens.

“Hotel California” by the Eagles can be challenging to solo over, which may in part be why the original solos by Don Felder and Joe Walsh are so iconic. Fortunately, like many other progressions, “Hotel California” can be broken down and made manageable.

This lesson assumes some familiarity with a few techniques I’ve covered in other lessons and in Fret Science: Improv 101. For reference, here are the core lessons this one draws from and builds on:

• Using the circle of 5ths to figure out the key of a song, plus Nashville notation (Improv 101: 7-2 and Improv 101: 8-1)
• Pentatonic gear shifts (Improv 101: 5-5)
• Triad overlays on the pentatonic scale (Improv 101: 7-4)
• The harmonic minor scale
• The Phrygian dominant scale

It’s not necessary to be an expert in all of these areas to follow this lesson, but those are good resources to review if you get stuck.

The chord progression

The chord progression of “Hotel California” is made up of eight chords:

Bm - F# - A - E - G - D - Em - F#7

We can largely ignore the difference between F# and F#7, although the presence of a dominant seventh chord will be a helpful clue later.

If we collect all of the individual notes from these chords, there are a total of nine notes, so we know right off the bat that there isn’t a single seven-note scale that will work over the entire progression. We can also see this because the progression contains five different major chords, whereas a seven-note major scale can only contain three.

If we plot the notes of each chord on one string (i.e., against a chromatic scale), we can see that there are two chords that each have a note that isn’t shared with any other chord in the progression. Specifically, the E chord contains a G#, and the F#/F#7 chord has an A#:

It turns out that these two chords are the outliers in this progression, and they’ll require special handling.

Nashville number analysis

One of the first things to try when analyzing any chord progression is to see if the cycle of fifths can help determine the key. Here are the chords from “Hotel California”:

In this case, if we leave out the problematic E and F# chords, we get this:

Relative to the D chord, F#m (which is not used in the song) would be the iii chord, and C#º (also note used) would be the viiº. Similarly, our two outlier chords would be labeled like this:

We can also think of the F# triad as the V of Bm (F#7 is the V7). F# is a perfect fifth above B, and it is a common practice in minor keys to make the V chord major (or dominant) like this because it creates a much stronger pull toward the Bm chord than a minor chord would. Whenever you see a major triad substituted like this, it’s a strong cue that the harmonic minor scale will be useful. In this case, the B harmonic minor scale will sound good over the F# chord. The fifth mode of harmonic minor is called the Phrygian dominant scale, so the F# Phrygian dominant scale is another way of thinking of B harmonic minor (i.e., they have the same notes) that is more centered on the F# chord.

The E chord is less common as a borrowed chord, but we can think of it as a secondary dominant for the A chord. There are two ways to find chord tone targets for it, as we’ll see shortly.

How to solo over this progression

In Improv 101, there are two fundamental approaches to improvising over chord changes. We can change scales to match each chord in the progression (generally using minor pentatonic for minor chords and major pentatonic for major chords), or we can identify a single baseline pentatonic scale and overlay triad patterns on rectangle and stack shapes to identify chord tone targets.

Both of these approaches work well with “Hotel California”, so let’s look at each of them in turn.

The triad overlay approach

“Hotel California” is, at heart, in the key of B minor. We can tell this because the Bm chord feels the most like home. It’s the first chord in the progression, and when the progression repeats, it sounds like it’s arriving at a resting place when it lands on Bm.

From this perspective, B minor pentatonic is the most obvious choice for a baseline scale to use for improvisation, but we could also use the B Aeolian (natural minor) scale since the Bm triad is the vi chord in our Nashville analysis.

We can find targets for most of the chords inside the Bm pentatonic rectangle and stack using the diatonic targets:

If you’re familiar with this approach to finding target notes, you will already have these seven pairs of patterns memorized, and in this song, they work for the D (I), Em (ii), G (IV), A (V), and Bm (vi) chords.

However, we will need to learn new target patterns for the E (II) and F# (III) chords:

It’s worth comparing the E and F# targets to the Em and F#m targets and noticing that, as you’d expect, one note in each diagram has been moved up one half step to shift from a minor third to a major third.

With this approach, we don’t need to worry about using the harmonic minor scale. We just make sure that we emphasize target notes from the triads and use the notes from the Bm pentatonic scale to connect them together into phrases.

So…putting this all together, if we wanted to improvise over the full chord progression in the familiar Form 1 B minor pentatonic position, these are the overlays:

Pentatonic gear shift approach

In the scale-shifting approach to soloing over changes, we begin with the same baseline B minor pentatonic scale used for the triad overlay approach. The B minor pentatonic rectangle and stack shapes also contain the notes for the D major pentatonic scale, and we will consider those scales (i.e., the vi/I pair) as being in a neutral position on the neck.

To play over a ii or IV chord, we would shift the scale shapes up one string set (i.e., the shifted up position), and to play over a iii or V chord, we would shift the shapes down one string (i.e., the shifted down position).

As a reminder, each major/minor scale pair shares two target note positions, and the third target position moves when you change between major and minor.

There’s a lot to unpack in the previous three paragraphs, so I recommend reviewing the Pentatonic gear shifts lesson before proceeding if you are confused.

Here is a summary of what we have so far:

These three pairs of scales take care of the D (I), Em (ii), G (IV), A (V), and Bm (vi) chords from the progression, but we still need a plan for the E and F# chords.

If we think of the E chord as the V of A, we can take the scale position for the A chord and shift down one string from there to play over the E chord. Since the A chord is the V in our Nashville scheme, and it is already in the shifted down position, the scale for the E chord will be shifted down two strings.

And that leaves the F# chord. We have two potential ways to play over this chord. First, we could use the B harmonic minor scale. To do this, we need to raise the ♭7 of the Aeolian scale to become a natural 7. We can do this by adjusting the shapes of the rectangle and stack to create the “minor major” rectangle and stack, as described in the ”Unlock the harmonic and melodic minor scales with the rectangle and stack” lesson:

In this formulation, the target notes are from the triad built on the fifth scale degree, so they are the notes labeled 5, 7, and 2. The notes labeled “1” are B’s, and the notes labeled “5” are F#'s.

I prefer to visualize the Phrygian dominant scale, as described in the ”Andalusian Cadence and the Phrygian Dominant Scale” lesson. This scale can be thought of as the Phrygian mode with a raised (major) third:

One important thing to notice is that the harmonic minor rectangle and stack align with the neutral position scales, whereas the Phrygian dominant rectangle and stack align with the shifted down scales. I don’t have a handy mnemonic that explains this…it just is.

Putting this all together, we have this series of shifts:

Starting with the familiar Form 1 pentatonic at the 7th fret, we get:

And from the Form 4 pentatonic at the 14th fret, we have:

Conclusion

I go back and forth about which chord tone targeting approach I prefer to use for this chord progression. There’s a lot of shifting going on in the gear shift approach, which can be confusing. I think the triad overlay approach is a little bit easier to play, and I suspect that it’s closer to how Don Felder was thinking when he originally improvised the solos for the song’s demo.

I highly recommend practicing both techniques in multiple positions and deciding for yourself!