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Dec 12, 2010 Guitar tabs
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Easy Ways To Improve Your Lead Guitar Playing

There are both easy and hard ways to improve your lead guitar playing. Some things you can do right away, others take much more time and effort. Both have their place, but if you are looking for an easy method to improve your lead guitar playing right now, read on. Most guitar players seek to improve their lead playing by ‘learning new skills’ and / or ‘practicing’ the mechanics of their existing skills. Certainly these are good things to do, but most players totally overlook (or least do not spend enough time on) learning how to ‘use’ their existing skills, creatively, consistently, and fluently.

Unfortunately, most guitar players struggle with their lead guitar playing for many years because they don’t understand the things that would really enable them to create consistently great guitar solos and songs with the skills and knowledge they already have. Instead, most simply try to acquire new skills and do not seek to go deeper by learning more about the skills they already have but have not yet refined.

In the lead Guitar Lesson video below, I’ll show you how to ‘use’ what you know and how to get cool sounds and emotion out of playing very few notes on the guitar. The more you learn how to get a lot from little, the easier it is for you to get a lot from a lot.

When creating or improvising guitar solos, most guitar players rely on ‘playing new notes’ (or more notes) in order to express themselves. This rarely works well.

The key to creating, improvising and playing great guitar solos is not ‘what’ you play, it’s ‘how you play it’.  Having great guitar phrasing is infinitely more valuable than having other great guitar skills. There are many ways to Learn Guitar phrasing, but the most important is to be able to play one note extremely well. Another great thing to practice is to make many small variations on a small single phrase. You want to focus not on what to play, or what the note options are, but instead on what you can do with a small phrase. How much emotion and interest you can squeeze out of something small.

Fact is, it is harder to be expressive with 2 or 3 notes than it is with lots of notes. However, after you master expression with a few pitches, your lead guitar playing will improve a lot when playing lots of notes.

I recommend to my Online Guitar students to train their lead guitar skills by working with ‘less’ notes, so that they can master the ability to become fully expressive using all the notes, techniques and skills that they can already play, instead of only working on ‘new skills’ all the time.

You can typically progress faster as a guitar player by learning how to use your ‘existing’ skills versus learning new ones.  Working with a small group of notes is one of the key ways you can immediately improve your lead guitar playing. The difference can be very dramatic in a short period of time.

Watch this guitar solo lesson video to learn exactly what I’m talking about and learn how to quickly improve your lead guitar playing.

To learn even more about how to improve your lead guitar playing, download this Free Guitar Lesson eBooK.

©Tom Hess Music Corporation.
All Rights reserved.

About the Author

About the author: Tom Hess is a professional guitarist and teaches online rock Guitar Lessons

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