Lead Guitar Lessons
Develop your own soloing style

Lead guitar isn't about playing as fast as possible so the notes become a senseless blur, nor is it about showing off your neo-classical composition skills (although that would indeed turn heads). It's about expressing personal emotion as though you're speaking through the guitar.

Eric Clapton, love or hate his music, never really played fast or overly complex lead guitar, but he developed an individual style. He mastered the art of personal expression. Same with Hendrix, Brian May and AC/DC's Angus Young, to name but a few.

In a nutshell: Learn each of the essential lead guitar techniques and theory, and then use this as foundation knowledge to build your ideas upon and experiment with. It's all about knowing what creative options you have...  

Alternate Picking

Alternate picking simply involves using up and down picking strokes alternately. Not as easy as it sounds at first, so this lesson should help you with accuracy and speed building.

String Bending

String bending really does liven up boring, flat solos, and every lead guitarist should be confident with using bends. Learn to bend with ease and precision with this introductory lesson. Part 1 introduces the physical basics, before we move on to trying in-scale bends over backing tracks in part 2.

Part 1: Bending Basics
Part 2: Bending in Scale

Hammer ons and pull offs

When learning lead guitar, hammer ons and pull offs should be one of the first techniques you look at. It's basically just another interesting texture to add to your soloing, just like string bending, vibrato etc. In these lessons I'll introduce the basic hammer on and pull off techniques, provide exercises to get all those fingers involved and finally look at how they work together.

Part 1: Hammer Ons
Part 2: Pull Offs
Part 3: Working them together effectively

String Vibratos

Vibratos make your notes sing! Punctuate your lead guitar phrases with this "effect" and it can inject the warmth and emotion you need to make that perfect solo expression. This lesson introduces the technique and then guides you through to mastering the physical aspects.

Part 1: Vibrato basics
Part 2: Working vibratos into solos

Finger Slides

Not to be confused with "bottle-neck" sliding used in country music, this is a finger technique which makes more use of single string lead guitar phrases. Using slides allows you to glide over more of the fretboard and bridge the gaps between the fixed scale shapes you learn over time. An important guitar technique to learn - come inside!

Finger Tapping

Get to grips with the physical side of this technique and your knowledge of scales will integrate naturally. If you follow both lessons below and take your time mastering various tapping rhythms and the physical side of it, it's actually not as difficult as it sounds!

Part 1: The Basics
Part 2: More complex patterns

Lead Guitar Lessons - Useful Stuff

Metronomes help you keep rhythm and timing with your lead guitar. It's important to use some kind of rhythm check on your playing from day 1, even though it is like chinese water torture...

Free Online Metronome

Alternatively, if you're looking for something that was designed to really help develop your playing speed and confidence, try what's known as the Ultimate Metronome.

Warmup!

Use the following chromatic exercise to warm up those fingers for 10 minutes. Use each string and go up and down the fretboard as much as possible using alternate picking...

More useful finger warm up exercises here!