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Lead Guitar Lessons

Lead Guitar LessonsWhen it comes time to consider lead guitar lessons, don't let the name lead guitar fool you. Around 75% of most music arrangements is the vocal part and if you only learn to be a great soloist, what are you going to play while the singer is singing? I've seen so many young guns spend all their time mastering their solo chops and learning to take an awesome solo, only to never successfully get in a good band because they couldn't play the rest of the song in any meaningful way. With the Guitar Lesson Expert, you will learn the appropriate balance between laying down the backdrop for the song and stepping up to shine during each and every solo. You'll also learn so many techniques, that each solo will be unique and not a rehash of something you just played.

Please understand that when I say laying down the backdrop, that can mean so many different things about how you’ll play the song. Are you in a power trio? Do you have a rhythm guitarist in the band? Is there a keyboard player? You’ve got to ask yourself tons of questions, like how much of the rhythmic fabric of this song is my responsibility, or how much freedom do I have to play counterpoint and play a part that plays virtual tag with the singer? Will you need to use upper partial chord voicings to lay in the feeling of strings or orchestral parts, all the while keeping the groove going and making the song sound as interesting as possible? Creating that level of interest in the rhythmic backing of the song is really the number 1 job of the lead guitarist, while the solo is the frosting.

When you listen to major lead guitarists, and I’ll pick Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin for this example, you hear riff based rhythms, upper partial chunks of chords creating an interactive rhythm part, or power chord partials in open fourths, fifths, or sixths. What you don’t typically hear is a guitarist simply strumming to the beat. As a result, one of the most important parts of a lead guitarist’s repertoire is having the ability to carve out and sculpt fragments of the chords in an interesting rhythm that dances with the bass and drums, while weaving its way through the song as the co-star with the singer’s melody, equal parts counter melody and syncopated rhythms or to pound out intoxicating riff-based rhythms in the style of the best of blues music.

The lead guitarist is arguably the most important non-singing musician on the stage from the standpoint of coordinating all of the musical elements much like a football quarterback runs each play. Lost in the thinking process about becoming a lead guitar player, is that you’ll usually need to be the most musically knowledgeable person in the band, other than possibly a keyboard player, and as such you’ll need to direct rehearsals, develop the arrangements of the tunes, work out all the transitions and modulations, and understand how to do any transpositions the singer might need to get the song in the right key. For those of you looking to play this vital role in any band, it’s almost a must to take lead guitar lessons and you couldn’t be in better hands than to take them with the Guitar Lesson Expert.

 

 

 Guitar Tracks Grey


melodic rock solo


blues rock solo


Hendrix style chordal solo


fingerstyle accompaniment


slide guitar solo


advanced fingerstyle
with violin solo


rock solo intro


fingerstyle accompaniment

© WhiteSpace Records
all song fragments used by permission

all pieces are excerpts from
"
R & D" by Rebeca & David