Learn Lead Guitar Fast Using 3 Practice Tips That Make Your Soloing Feel Creative & Expressive In No Time
It’s a shame when you spend a ton of time practicing lead guitar techniques but still can’t play killer solos like you want. Don’t worry though, this is a very common problem many players face… and there are tons of easy and fun ways to overcome it.
You learn to play creative lead guitar fast by focusing on the general concepts of integration and application. Meaning: integrating the skills you have together with other skills and applying what you know in a musical manner.
This makes your lead guitar playing feel creative and expressive so it draws people in whenever they hear you.
Lead Guitar Practice Tip #1: Start Using Scales More Musically
Whether you feel you’ve mastered a scale or not, get started using it in a musical way. This helps you learn to use your skills creatively so you don’t end up scratching your head when the time comes to improvise or play a guitar solo.
In other words:
This also helps you learn to play fast lead guitar parts that feel like they make sense as a melody, rather than just speeding through a bunch of mindless patterns.
Use this practice circuit to infuse creativity together with technique while using scales:
1. For 1 minute, practice (only) the first 5 notes of a scale.
2. For 2 minutes, use the same 5 notes to freely improvise a
guitar lick.
Try to create as many variations of this guitar lick as you can within the time limit using bends, vibrato, slides or other techniques.
3. For 2 minutes, freely improvise using one octave of the scale as you did in step 2.
4. For 5 minutes, freely improvise using one octave of the scale as you did in the previous steps, only this time do the following: before each variation play a chord using the notes from the scale.
For example: If you are playing the E minor scale, play the E minor chord then the lick, then F# diminished and the lick, then G major, then A minor, etc. Play through all the chords in the scale. This helps you develop a better ear while integrating chords together with your phrases.
Lead Guitar Practice Tip #2: Make Memorable Guitar Solo Licks Using Vocal Lines From Your Favorite Singer
Inside the vocal lines of great songs lies secrets to excellent musical phrasing. Use the vocal lines of your favorite singers to give your guitar soloing structure and emotional expressiveness.
This is both easy to do and fun. Plus, it only takes a little practice to start seeing big results for your lead guitar playing.
Apply what you learned by transcribing 5 vocal melodies of your favorite singers using your guitar.
Then improvise with each one with the goal of creating 25 variations of the melody. This helps you become much more creative while putting together your own phrases in the future.
One good way to get started is to play the first half of the melody, then improvise the second half (and vice versa).
Lead Guitar Practice Tip #3: Make Your Arpeggios Stand Out By Thinking Outside-Of-The-Box
Don’t fall into the bad habit of playing sweep picking arpeggios up and down the fretboard in the same way every time. No matter if you are playing an advanced arpeggio pattern or a simple one, playing it creatively makes it sound much more interesting.
Here are some ideas for how to make your guitar arpeggios sound more creative:
Idea #1: Use different note rhythms to play the
notes, rather than the same one every time. For example, don’t just play the
notes as fast as possible, add rests, play some notes using eight notes, others
using 16ths and so on.
This makes your arpeggios sounds much more musical.
Idea #2: Play arpeggios in different inversions (use patterns that have a different note in the bass other than the root).
Idea #3: Combine arpeggios together with scales until they begin to feel like one cohesive musical idea rather than separate elements. This makes your solos really flow smoothly!
Now you have some great ideas to help you play fast and creative guitar licks. This is just the beginning though. Get many more creative ideas to apply into your playing right now by studying this free guitar soloing resource.