Question about guitar soloing?

Pop and country songs have solos sometimes (never heard of that Christian Hope, I guess it's some christian-themed variation of pop or country).

Otoh, there are also many blues and rock songs that don't have solos (they are common in the genre, but not mandatory).

So you can do whatever you feel like. Let your musical interests decide. In the end, all a solo is is a melody: just like you sing a melody on top of a song with your voice, in this case the "voice" is your guitar, playing single notes instead of chords. So don't get too concerned about scales and all that theoretic stuff; in the end, everything people cares about is if a melody is nice or not, not if it belongs to such scale, or it is played in this or that mode...

You will greatly benefit from lessons with a professional guitar teacher. You sound serious about your guitar goals so a serious approach to learning would be best for you and that's what lessons will give you. On your own you are bound to miss important steps and possibly pick up bad habits that will have to be corrected later. Do yourself a favor and get lessons.

Good luck!

The best advice I can give is to learn properly to play the guitar. Don't try to pick out aspects that you think might be useful/easy/enjoyable.

You don't want to be thinking about soloing, improvisation or composing until you are a a reasonably competent player. Stick to the basics. This will involve learning to play chords, scales, melodies, an understanding of very basic theory and, probably, some basic fingerpicking.

Assuming that, by soloing, you mean playing the guitar over the top of other instruments (rather than playing solo on a guitar with no other instruments) I can't think of any kind of music where it's not common. To do it though, like I said, you need to be able to play well.

You didn't ask this but the best way to learn to play is by taking lessons from a good teacher. The worst way is to try to find separate bits and pieces that you guess you need to learn maybe from You Tube.

Good luck.

There's an author named Wilbur Savidge who wrote a bunch of great books about playing the guitar, with great explanations of the basics of chord structure, scale structure, and music theory in general. If you can get a hold of some of his stuff, you'll be better off for it.