Learn To Play Lead Guitar Fast & Make Your Solos Sound Awe-Inspiring Like The Pros

Ever tried playing fast lead guitar solos, but they just don’t sound as cool as the ones of your favorite players? Playing fast solos that sound creative takes practice just like developing the skills needed to play with solid technique.

Good news: You quickly start playing awesome sounding lead guitar when you get into the habit of studying your favorite players and make creativity a major goal.

Adding time into your guitar practice schedule to work on this makes practice more fun and helps you use your technical skills to start playing solos that make people think of you as a true pro player.

Add as little as one hour of intensely focused practice per week to the following exercises to start playing fast lead guitar solos that are awe-inspiring:

Study Your Favorite Lead Guitar Players To Learn Their Secrets

A big mistake many guitarists make is to not spend time analyzing the amazing guitarists they want to play like. There is often a treasure trove of information to discover by truly “studying” a guitar solo by your favorite player.

Here are several ways to improve your lead guitar playing fast by studying your favorite guitarists and solos:

· Make a list of the guitar solos you want to learn. Then study them by breaking each one down into individual notes and phrases. Write down the key of the solo, transcribe the notes, memorize it on guitar and pay close attention to how its phrases are structured.

· Play a short section of a guitar solo until you are able to play it consistently. Then observe how it was made by feeling how tension is created and released. Think of 5 short variations of the lick by trying to re-create this same feeling of tension and release.

· Compare and contrast the solos of your favorite players from their studio albums and live albums. If any notes are changed, which one sounded better and why?

Practice Improvising Lead Guitar Licks With Creative Limitations

Turning on your favorite backing track and improvising over it is great… but there are many more ways to improve your lead guitar playing. By adding creative limitations to your improvising, you challenge yourself to improve specific phrasing skills to help your soloing improve.

Below are some ideas to get you started.

Improvise for 5 minutes by:

· Only using your pinky.

· Only playing on two adjacent strings.

· Only playing on two strings while skipping one that is in between them (such as the high E string and G string).

· Use double stops only.

· Play with the same note rhythm constantly, without stopping (such as eighth notes).

Using these kinds of limitations challenges your brain to think in ways it might not if you were to simply improvise freely. When you go back to improvising like normal, it feels much easier to be creative than it did before.

Get better at playing fast and creative guitar solos by using this style of practice as a supplement together with normal practice. This makes your soloing sound effortless just like any of your favorite players.

Focus On Technique Integration For More Expressive Soloing

Playing fast lead guitar solos sometimes end up sounding like a blur of fast notes with little emotional expression. You don’t want that! You make your soloing sound emotional, expressive and technical by:

· Integrating different techniques together

· Practicing creativity with these techniques while improvising

A great way to make your guitar soloing more creative is to use techniques like bending and vibrato to squeeze as much expression out of a note or phrase as possible.

This video shows you how to make your guitar phrases higher-quality using this principle:

Practice this idea by playing a short (no more than 5 note) phrase and thinking of 25 ways to make it different using bends, vibrato, tremolo picking, harmonics or legato playing. Don’t add/change the notes, just focus on enhancing the phrase.

After practicing this idea enough, every guitar solo you play becomes much more creative. This makes it sound even more interesting when you use your technical skills to add fast runs to your solos.

Develop Killer Bends & Vibrato To End Fast Lead Guitar Runs With A Bang

Bending and vibrato technique are two of the most expressive techniques you can use on guitar. Learning how to use them together gives you the ability to end any guitar solo with a bang!

These tips help you master both techniques:

Focus on keeping your bends and vibrato in control as shown in the video below:

1. Practice vibrato by using it on every note in a scale. Do the same with bending to bend up to the next correct note in the scale.

Practice bending and adding vibrato with a metronome to improve your timing. Then focus on using great timing while playing in actual music.

How To End Your Fast Lead Guitar Runs With A Bang

After using the previous tips to improve your technique, use this idea in your solos:

The most memorable notes of a guitar solo are often the first and last. Using vibrato and bends on these notes makes them really grab someone’s attention! In this case, let’s focus on the last note.

1. Create a short, fast phrase using a scale of your choice. Have the last note end on the scale’s tonic note (for example: In A minor, the tonic note is “A”).

2. To play the final note, strike the string to play a fret below it and bend up to match the pitch of the note.

3. Once you have reached the final note, let it ring out for one second.

4. Next, strike the string again and apply heavy vibrato!

This phrasing idea quickly builds tons of suspense, then slams the listener in the face with intense vibrato that is sure to get their attention.

Practice this idea with several different phrases until it becomes second nature. Then use it in your guitar soloing to make fast runs sound creative and intense.

Now you know how to play fast guitar solos that feel and sound like those of the pros. However, there is much more to learn in order to become a killer guitarist. Discover more ways to play creative and awesome lead guitar solos.