How To Play Lead Guitar Solos With Fast Speed Using Practice Techniques That Work

Correct Difficult Notes Within Certain Licks By Creatively Accenting 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 skills to improve and overcoming the barrier you are at to rapidly deal with the problem.

As an example:

Having great challenges 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 typical issue results in many people getting thrown off and becoming unclean while performing a quick run.

This keeps 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.

Bonus Tip: Make better quality guitar solos by using this simple process…

Take any short phrase and create at least 20 variations from it using different phrasing techniques such as:

Playing with different types of pick articulation

using palm muting vs. letting the strings ring open

vibrato

legato

bends

rubato, (see this video: http://tomhess.net/HowToImproveGuitarPhrasing.aspx)

…and any combinations of the above

Do this for just 10 minutes a day.

This helps you develop incredibly good phrasing skills, so you are able to play both expressively AND fast!

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 exceptionally 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.