How To Play Lead Guitar

Here's some good tips if you're working on lead guitar.

By: Masni Rizal Mansor

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.

About the author:


Masni Rizal Mansor provide tips and review on acoustic guitar, electric guitar.