How To Play Fast Lead Guitar Solos Better With Effective Practice
Does it sometimes feel like a struggle to play lead guitar as fast, clean and creatively as you want to?
Learning how to effectively practice to solve the root causes to your problems makes the entire process more fun and less frustrating.
What’s one good approach for doing this?
Answer:
Exaggerating issues in your playing to make them harder so that:
1. You identify your mistakes more clearly
2. The original thing you were trying to play feels
easier by comparison
It becomes easier to overcome plateaus in your playing. This is how you make it feel effortless to play lead guitar solos that not only have speed, but sound good too.
Correct Challenging Notes Within Certain Licks By Creatively Highlighting Them
Embellishing the difficult notes in a guitar exercise makes the issue become a lot easier to correct. This has the effect of you giving lots of confidence in your strengths to improve and overcoming the barrier you are at to promptly attend to the problem.
As an example:
Having great difficulties playing the notes of a scale pattern when it is layed out so you have to move from one position to another on the fretboard.
This frequent issue results in many people getting thrown off and becoming unclean while performing a quick run.
This prevents you from playing fast lead guitar solos that are clean and flow beautifully from one idea to the next.
These are a number of ways to magnify the overall difficulty of a fretboard shift in the middle of a scale run:
– As an alternative to trying to push through the position adjustment (effectively avoiding it in the process ), focus on it.
– Focus on this segment of the scale by playing it 5-10 more times than the other parts.
– Pick the notes using a lot of picking power in your attack.
– Use different, less functional fingerings in your fretting hand.
– Move outside of the scale to make the position switch even wider.
For instance, if the change calls for moving up by one fret, move up a few and play the same scale (but out of key).
All of these methods make the initial position shift seem easy by comparison, and make it much easier to correct in less time. Practice with every one (and come up with your own as well) for 2-3 minutes before practicing as usual.
Strengthen Your Muting Technique By Skipping Strings
When you are failing to keep unwanted strings from making noise, this is because you do not mute them effectively.
This problem is extremely common and is avoided in numerous ways. A good method is to work on whatever you are having difficulty with using string skips. This technique makes muting a lot more challenging, so that playing like normal becomes simple.
Pick any guitar pattern and add only one note to it that forces you to begin skipping over a string. Then work on moving back and forth between this note and a few other notes within the pattern while paying attention to the way you are using your hands to mute the strings.
As string skipping eventually becomes more effortless for you, add it into your guitar phrases to give your music a broader pitch range without having to change positions.
Note: Muting is not to be confused with palm muting. If you want to improve your palm muting, use this advice:
How To Make Your Palm Muting More Consistent
Throughout your playing you
varied a lot between playing with lighter palm muting and very hard muting.
To make your playing really
tight, you should focus on maintaining the same consistent muting all the time
while playing.
There is a difference between
consciously choosing to mute harder/softer vs. varying the muting intensity
without being aware of it (this difference is easy to hear).
Practice muting using any guitar lick or riff and playing in the same area over the pickups for 1 minute. Watch your picking hand as you do this to stay focused.
Keep Your Hands Together For Cleaner Playing Using Double Picking
Speedy lead guitar solos get ruined by mistakes whenever you are unable to mentally follow the movements of your hands on the fretboard. This causes them to become out of sync and the entire phrase breaks down. Accelerating your note processing ability is how you address this problem.
One solution to
thinking quicker while playing is to play every note two times. This has the
effect of giving your fretting hand ample time to catch up with what your
picking hand is playing.
Adding double picking to your guitar soloing also sounds cool as a creative phrasing idea. Try it out!
Get more free tips to improve your soloing with this lead guitar guide.