Solo and lead guitar is what facinates an awful lot of beginners. Unfortunately it’s also that part of learning guitar that takes the most work. There are some things you can put your time into learning that will be very useful. This article is going to be a fast primer on learning to play lead guitar and developing your own solos.
Scales
Soloing and lead guitar starts with scales. If you don’t yet know your Blues and pentatonic scales this is something you should start on right away. If you’re not using a guitar lesson program that’s no problem. There are lots of free videos out there you can access which will provide a lesson on playing pentatonic scales.
Once you’ve learned the basics of these scales you want to practice them forwards and backwards to first master accuracy and later improve your speed. You should do this for all the shapes of each scale. At first don’t worry too much about what key it is you’re playing in, you want to master moving around the scale.
Improvising
Next you want to start working on making up some licks of your own. Play around inside the different scale shapes you’ve been practicing. This will help you improvise inside the scale shapes. Playing the scale backwards and forwards is great but it’s not really original. Making up small solos of your own within the shape is the first step to being a creative lead guitar player.
Since the shapes maintain the same for each key you’re playing in licks and pieces you create when practicing are transferable to any key you may just have to move the position of the shape up or down the fret board.
Keys
Once you have a solid understanding of the scales backwards and forwards it’s time to start introducing keys and theory. If you haven’t done any theory study before this will take a bit of time for you but it’s something you are going to want to do.
Understanding what chords fall into which Keys is important. You need to know this so if you’re jamming with someone you can quickly recognize which scale you can play from that will fit the particular chord progressions.
Next you’ll want to memorize which scales match up with each key. From this you’ll be already to play along on the fly with friends or a band when they’re jamming.
That’s the intro to learning to be a great lead guitar player.