Learn How To Become A Highly Creative Lead Guitar Player
Think your lead guitar creativity sucks because you simply don't know enough licks, scales or riffs? WRONG! Fact is, you will only make things worse by trying to learn tons of new materials. To truly learn how to play lead guitar with highly expressive creativity, you must master using the skills you already know in a musical context.
Learn how this is done so you can quickly become a much more creative lead guitar player by watching the video below.
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Having A Hard Time Playing Guitar Clean & Rhythmically Tight? Give This A Shot:
Ever play a guitar lick or run during a solo and you are ahead of/behind the click in a number of places (even more so when a guitar phrase repeats)?
Practice this:
Record a short lick (preferably) into some kind of music software that visualizes the grid of beats so you can see where the notes of the lick ) match to the beat.
This gives you prompt visual and audio information on how close you are to being totally in time. Regardless, you should also work on recording your guitar playing and then listening to what you played very thoroughly (using headphones if you can) to spot when you play notes a little bit before the click happens. You want to pull away mentally a bit more to make them occur directly on the beat.
How To Clean Up Your Sweep Picking To Use In Solos
When you practice arpeggios, use distortion instead of a clean tone.
This is crucial given that you will be playing with distortion while playing arpeggios in this manner a lot of the time (I'm assuming that you are a rock guitar player).
So, it makes sense to practice the way you will play, approximately 90% of the time-- and in addition, this makes you more conscious of any matters of string noise that appear. Sloppy playing (and string noise) always sounds more evident when using distortion, so practice with it to eliminate your mistakes.
Tip: How To Play Guitar With Shred Speed Without Taking Forever
To push your guitar speed to the edge take a very small segment of any scale pattern, arpeggio, or solo and play it at a much higher tempo than you can play the full phrase at.
For instance, if you are playing this phrase at 140 bpm, try these small fragments at 10 bpm more.
This will sync both your hands and your mind accustomed to faster speeds but still keep it manageable for you to play (since you are only using a few notes at a time).
Then slowly extend the segment until you are working on the total guitar part at that faster tempo.
Needless to say, when doing this don't permit your two hand sync to get clumsy at the faster tempos. Correct this by double picking the notes at a much slower bpm.
How To Make Speedy Guitar Playing 100% Tight
Often we play a little bit in front of or after the beat.
This results guitar playing that doesn't sound very good.
Easy!
This just suggests you need to practice becoming more tight with your rhythm playing. Timing is a very critical skill you will need to develop, specifically for playing in bands and/or doing any kind of studio recording.
So, what do you do when you need to improve at playing with excellent rhythm (tighter)?
Very first step is to turn on a metronome or backing track ).
The most effective way to improve at it is to try recording your playing with a metronome , and listen back to whatever you played.
Listen closely for flaws in your timing.
As you learn to hear where the timing issues happen, it is pretty simple to repair your mistakes and play very tight.
Note: Don't use a bunch of guitar effects such as flange, chorus or reverb when you practice.
These things often conceal issues in your playing (such as poor articulation for instance) and you don't end up fixing them. Also, when playing fast, if there is some effect being used with your distortion, it makes things challenging to catch all the notes making your playing sound more sloppy than it really is.
One Huge Recommendation For All Guitar Players:
Get started working with a guitar teacher rather than learning all on your own.
It's extremely easy to find yourself stuck in your guitar playing and not aware of what must be done to get better without someone experienced to instruct you.
This makes improving on guitar feel tedious and unmotivating rather than enjoyable - as it should be.
This is most commonly why I strongly recommend all guitarists take lessons with a great guitar teacher.
This is very vital for helping you make accelerated progress, because a really good guitar teacher is good at getting you to notice where you are on the wrong road, adjust any ongoing poor playing habits and acquire new information about playing guitar that you would not have discovered if you learned solely by yourself.
Not only does this make achieving your guitar playing goals more enjoyable, it makes it massively less frustrating. Additionally, you become a better overall player, in less time.
When you are set to achieve a higher level of skill in your guitar playing, I am actively teaching new guitar students.
I have given instruction for over twenty five years to thousands of musicians around the world and am very proud of the end results I have been glad to get for them.
This is what my guitar students say about taking breakthrough guitar lessons:
“When I met Tom Hess, I knew that this is the guy. Just going through the evaluation form, all the questions, different questions, and he was digging deeper and deeper into all my goals and all that stuff... and no one has ever done that with me before, so I felt right away that this is the guy.”
The level that I was at before I went to Tom for lessons was that I could play pretty fast, I could play sloppy, I didn’t know nothing about music theory, so I was kind of unbalanced, I was uneven. I was a good player technically, but I knew very little about music theory. So I wanted to even that out, and Tom has helped me, not only evening that out, but also exceeding my expectations. So now I’m playing at a level that I didn’t expect that I could play at. So that’s... I’m very happy with that.
I like lessons with Tom because of the format basically. He gives a variety of formats... not just one format, like video for example, but also pdf files and audio files that you can take with you if you’re doing something else... you have to do labor that day, laundry or whatever... then you can listen to the sessions and while... you can actually benefit when you’re not even practicing, so it’s a no brainer.Gottfrid Norberg Waxin, Sweden
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
“I've played guitar for several years and I think I've taken it as far as I could take it and I was going on the internet and found Tom, I take Breakthrough Guitar Lessons from him and I have to say it was the best thing that I've ever could have done. There is nothing better than Breakthrough Guitar Lessons with Tom.”
Tom has the innate ability to hone in on whatever problems you have and immediately fix it for you. The lessons are very goal oriented, very detailed and Tom is very approachable. I consider Tom to be a master teacher. A master teacher is someone who cares about their students, who talks to their students, who shares with their students and gets them to the place that they need to be as a guitar player. And Tom, I will tell you, does all of that and more.
Rovan Deon, Rahway, NJ, USA
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