Step by Step Lead Guitar Lessons for Beginners
- 1). Learn how to play major, minor and pentatonic scales all over the guitar neck. Virtually all of the guitar solos in popular music are constructed using one of these types of scales. Knowing these scales inside out will make learning guitar solos significantly simpler.
- 2). Study common lead-guitar techniques such as bending, sliding, tremolo picking, hammer-ons, pull-offs, vibrato, harmonics and tapping. You do not need to be proficient at all of these techniques before learning how to play lead guitar, but you should at least be aware of them and what they are. The vast majority of lead lines and solos use some combination of these techniques.
- 3). Set up your amplifier with the correct tone (if playing electric guitar). Trying to learn how to play heavily distorted metal solos on an amp's clean channel will sound wrong, no matter how advanced your technical prowess. Likewise, jazzy, chord-based lead parts will sound muddy if played with heavy distortion. Let the style of music as well as your ear dictate the sound to use when learning lead guitar.
- 4). Find a song with a simple-sounding lead line and learn how to play it. Guitar tabs (a form of music notation that uses numbers to represent frets) will help you learn how to play your favorite lead licks. Guitar tabs can be found in music books or online.
- 5). Learn the lead-guitar parts. Use a metronome to help keep proper time when learning these parts. Start by learning the parts at a slow tempo, then increase the tempo (using the metronome to ensure that you are playing the part correctly) until you can play the parts at full speed.
- 6). Repeat the process of learning songs. Always challenge yourself to play harder guitar parts. This is the best and most fun way to learn how to play lead guitar. You can practice dull exercises in order to improve your technique, but learning how to play real songs is more fun and can deliver better results.
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