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How To Play Lead Guitar - 5 Easy Steps
Do you want to learn how to play lead guitar? Many guitarists are happy to simply play with the acoustic version of the instrument, write a few songs and learn to sing some of their favourites. This is all well and good but some of us just want to wail out some screeching lead guitar. Sometimes the idea of a blazing solo or thunderous riff is just more exciting than strumming along to the latest Green Day song. With that in mind, I’ve set out 5 easy steps to get you learning lead guitar. How To Play Lead Guitar-Step 1
Learn to identify what key a piece of music is in. If you can read music this is easy enough because it’s in the score, but if not (like most guitarists) you will have to use your ears. A moderately successful method of doing this is to listen for the first and last chord of the song-this will often be the Key Chord. It’s pretty hard to identify it by ear alone, so it may require you to sit with your and use trial and error until you find something on your own instrument that sounds the same. How To Play Lead Guitar-Step 2
Learn a pentatonic scale shape. Pentatonic just means five note scale, so don’t be afraid of the word as it’s probably the easiest scale to learn. There are five shapes to the regular pentatonic scale, but for now you will only need to learn one shape. Find it from a book or Google it or whatever, and once you have an idea of it, practice it by playing it up and down over and over again. This will improve both your precision and your muscle memory, and both are essential for playing lead guitar. How To Play Lead Guitar-Step 3
Learn to associate the scale shape you
learned with a key. Typically you can slide a pentatonic shape to different places on the neck to make it sound like it is in different keys. What you want to do now is to find the pentatonic position which fits the key of the song you worked with in step one. This will probably be easier if you have a neck diagram to refer to. How To Play Lead Guitar-Step 4
Learn some licks! Any good lead guitarist will spend hours and hours learning licks finding new ones etc, and for some people this is the most enjoyable part. Stay within your allotted pentatonic shape, and try making little runs, sliding from one note to another and bending up from one note to another. It takes practice but the standard pentatonic shape is the home for many of the most recognisable rock and blues licks, so it shouldn’t take too long before you uncover some things that are pleasing to the ear. How To Play Lead Guitar-Step 5
Play! So far we’ve learned to identify the key of a piece of music, associate it with a scale of the same key, and also by now we should have found some cool licks from the scale in that key-now comes the fun part! We want to be able to put all that into a music context, so take the song we used in Step 1, play it on your stereo and try to fit some of your licks you discovered into it using your own guitar. This can be one of the most fun things to do with guitar. It takes some practice, but in time you will be wailing alongside your heroes. Hopefully, for those of you that aren’t satisfied with strumming along to acoustic stuff, this mini guide has helped you learn how to play lead at least a little. Happy wailing!
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