Learn Lead Guitar

June 15th, 2006

Many newbies are fascinated by the way lead guitarists are blazing through a solo and keep wondering how they can do that. They just can’t understand how these people figure out which notes can would sound right before playing them. The following article is aimed to show some perspective on how to learn lead guitar and begin to make up your own guitar solos.

The Blues Scale

What many beginner guitarists who want to learn lead guitar do not know that improvising doesn’t mean just playing random notes and hoping they will sound great together. Before you can learn lead guitar, you should know that professional guitar players usually draw their solos from a scale, which they are using as a template for improvisation. The blues scale, despite the name, is actually a scale used very often in all guitar solo styles.

How to Use It?

Try practicing this scale forwards and backwards, while using alternate picking and make sure you play each note evenly and cleanly. After you got this right, try to play each note two times before you get to the next one. Make up different ways to play the blues scale to challenge your playing skills.
Play the blues scale so that the root begins on the letter name of the scale you are trying to play. For example, if you want to play a C blues scale, you’ve got to find the note C on the fretboard and start the scale from that note.

Improvising

Once you’ve become familiar with the blues scale, you might want to take up some theory lessons and learn more on the different positions of pentatonic and blues scales. However, you can get to play a lot of great stuff just by using the single position explained above, so start practicing on making up your own solos before you memorize tons of scale positions.

Once you’ve managed to learn lead guitar basics, you can start improvising. The concept is fairly simple: all you have to do is string together some licks from the blues scale that sound good together. However, when you try to do it, you’ll realize it’s actually more difficult than it sounds. You might want to get some soloing lessons for beginner guitarists that want to learn lead guitar. Accesrock.com provides some good lessons.

After you did some practicing, you should visit the Home for all Guitar Lovers website that shows several guitar licks. You can try to memorize some of these and use them in your own solos. Don’t get frustrated if you play rather badly at first; if you like what you’re doing, it will get better over time.

Posted by Guitar Tutor at 11:02 am. | Permalink