lead guitar help

Easier said than done, but you have to hear it in your head first. As soon as you find the right key, the rest of the notes aren't far away.

Good luck,

Mike

If you have/ or can afford the equipment, you could record yourself playing a chord progression (even a simple one will do) to a metronome beat, and then re-play or sample that rhythm, figure out what key it's in, and practise making lead melodies over top.

I'm doing this the last few days and I'm surprising myself in how good it sounds. Once the rhythm is going, you just try different notes from the box pattern(s), and melodies come to you almost out of thin air. Try various note lengths for the notes and rests...that'll give it more interest. You can also buy guitar play-along CDs or rhythm tracks.

If you can play the scales, then you have eveything you need to make the step to more melodic leads. Try these ideas:

Long note - short notes - long note - short notes

Play a note on the next string instead of just the next note up or down the scale

Bend the strings during long notes

Use double-stops

Use hammer-ons and pull-offs to create trills and "legato" - smooth playing

and you'll be amazed the difference it makes

Best,

A :-)

Learning to improvise with backing tracks is a great help. A Google search for "backing tracks" will yield thousands of examples, mostly MP3's you can download. Olav Torvund's guitar site http://www.torvund.net/guitar/ has invaluable advice on improvisation, and loads of MIDI backing tracks in different progressions and tempos. (You can play MIDI files with Media Player etc.)

I work out about 1hr a day with backing tracks - it's the best form of practice I know 8) It's not useful just for learning specific songs - you can try out different scales and modulations against different chord progressions, and see how the harmony side of improvisation works in practice - and Olav's tracks are all available in 65, 90 & 120 BPM, so you can get all the tempo bases covered too.

Do this for 6 months, and there'll be no holding you :D

The real key to playing melodically is to first hear melodically - Mike's already mentioned that.

Playing lead guitar lines isn't following some scale or arpeggio map, it's expressing yourself. There are tricks you can use to not sound bad (like limiting your notes to chord tones), but there are no tricks to sounding good.

It's a three-way loop: hear what you want in your head, play what you think you hear with your fingers, and use your ears to decide if what you just did is right or if you need to change course.

Between those three parts are some important skills you'll need... you have to be able to connect the dots between them:

Getting what you hear from your head to your fingers - you do that by practicing the skill. Take any familiar melody (Christmas carol, TV theme, whatever) and play it. Keep repeating that exercise with different melodies; eventually you'll be able to get closer and closer to playing what you intend to.

Getting from your fingers to your ears - that's a short term memory skill. You need to be able to imagine a riff, and remember what you imagine long enough to compare it critically with the 'copy' that you made on your guitar. There are some magic moments when good stuff just flows out of you, but most of the time this is going to be work - you'll be actively listening. So practice active listening... don't immerse yourself in your favorite CDs, but really try to hear every note, the relationships between the notes, and eventually the overall structure.

Then there's the editing step - what you did is ok, but not what you heard. That means that what you planned to do next might not work out so well. If you can work with another guitarist, do call-and-response drills... hear a riff, play a variation. Trade it back and forth. You'll need to be able to make a rapid 'twist' to your original idea when your fingers don't land quite where they should. (Don't worry, that'll happen less and less as you gain experience - but it still happens to everybody sometimes. Your goal is to make those mistakes invisible - as Thelonius Monk said, "if a note ain't right when I start with it, it's right when I'm done with it")

Master those, and you're miles ahead of the game. Then you're ready for the advanced stuff, structure:

A melody tells a story; it's got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Plan your solos this way - if you're doing 16 bars, you might have 4 bars that begin your story, 10 bars that get into the detail, and 2 bars that end it.

Your beginning is where you say your basic idea - the riff that will define the solo. Don't be timid - that's a really common error many lead players make. You're the one telling the story; you must be sure of how it starts.

The middle is where you say it a different way. Think about it in terms of writing a story... it starts out "I went to the mall". Now maybe you describe the mall, or you say what you were shopping for, or you mention who you met. This expanded idea is related to the mall, and it has to flow that way. This is where your call-and-response drill comes in really handy - just expand on your beginning.

Maybe you reach a point where you're bored with the mall, and you do something else - you wander to the bar across the street to shoot some pool. That's a different story, and it should also have a beginning, middle, and end - but it's not your main story. It has to segue from the original beginning, and it has to lead back into it (your story was about the mall; don't leave your listeners hanging). This is a contrasting section... make it different from the original, but make it easy for yourself to get back to the story line.

Then you've got the ending. A lousy ending ruins a good story. You have a target here: getting back into the chord progression of the next verse or whatever. It's got to sound finished; you need to say "so that's what happened on my trip to the mall" and let folks know you're all done. Practice building two-bar runs on simple changes like E7-A (two bars of E7, change to A on beat 1 of measure 3). Build riffs that just slam right into that A and scream out "ok, I'm done!".

Now make those riffs related to the beginning of your story :)

There's an awful lot you can do to improve your solos once you have the basic skills: study composition and analysis; break down solos you like and study them from different angles; try to imagine melodic shapes, and build lines that match the shapes, etc.

But there's also one thing that won't help: learning more scales. Lots of guitarists get unhappy with their solo results, and start looking for a 'better' scale to use. I'll shift from the literature analogy to art now...

You draw a house. You show it to someone and they say "nice drawing - it's a cow, right?" Trying it again using a blue pencil instead of a black one won't make it look any more like a house.

Learning more scales puts new colors in your pencil box. Give an artist a new color, and they can do even more things than they could before... but if you're not an artist yet, they really distract you from the goal of learning to draw.

So stick with one scale until you're happy with what you can do with it. Great solos don't come from knowing a lot of scales... they come from knowing a lot about what you can do with the colors you have at hand.

You are a teacher, NoteBoat, through & through - that's a tremendous mini-essay on lead 8) Wow! I wish I could explain things even half as well ...

V v good point about not becoming a scale-collector - and if you look at some of the really great improvisors, people like Mike Bloomfield for example - what they're doing is not that complex, technically - it's all in the phrasing, timing, what's left out as much as what's put in. (I make an exception for "Holy Modal Majesty" - which is not a track I like to listen to that much!)

Well-made point about the mistakes too - actually I sometimes find some of my own best (? least regrettable?) solos actually come out of making a mistake in the first bar or two - and getting taken off in a direction I'd never intended. What began as covering a mistake ends up with a whole new slant on whatever it is we're playing :lol:

thanks for all the help! I really appreciate all the advice!!

and especially thanks to Note Boat for the huge effort! :D

and especially thanks to Note Boat for the huge effort! :D

That's just the tip of the iceberg for him, bro. :wink:

Wow! In this topic people just answered alot of my current questions. Even though I didnt ask the question. GUITAR NOISE DELIVERS! Thankyou everyone!