How To Play Better Lead Guitar Licks Using Creative Bending Technique
Your lead guitar licks sound more engaging and unique when you use creative bending technique. Most guitarists use only a few variations in their bending... limiting their musical expression greatly. If you know less than 10 ways to bend strings, you have a big opportunity to improve your guitar playing quickly.
Find out how to play with creative bending technique to make your soloing sound great by watching this video demonstration:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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An Essential Tip For All Guitarists:
Start taking lessons with a guitar teacher rather than learning without help.
It's extremely easy to wind up stuck in your guitar playing journey and not aware of what you need to do to make improvement without someone experienced to instruct you.
This makes trying to get better at guitar feel frustrating and demotivating rather than enjoyable - as it ought to be.
This reason is why I advise all guitarists take lessons with a great guitar teacher.
This is very valuable for helping you make tons of progress, because a really good guitar teacher is reliable at getting you to notice where you are going wrong, fix any playing habits and get new insights about playing guitar that you may not have heard about if you learned solely by yourself.
Not only does this make getting better on guitar more enjoyable, it makes it massively less frustrating. Also, you become a much better guitar player, very quickly.
When you are all set to achieve a high level of skill in your guitar playing, I am currently giving lessons to new guitar students.
I have taught guitar for over two decades to thousands of guitarists and am very proud of the guitar playing wins I have been able to get for them.
This is what a few killer guitarists say about taking guitar lessons:
“I basically made a decision, you know I’ve been playing on and off for most of my life, I made a decision to get serious about this again or just sell the equipment and be done with it you know... either do it or don’t.”
I had searched around, you know found a lot of the free sites you know that are on the internet. Learned some cool stuff. Happened to stumbled upon Tom, I don’t remember exactly how, but anyway… I was a bit skeptical at first, you know, but decided to give it a chance and haven’t looked back since.
Greg Frus, Olympia, Washington, USA
“I was looking for help, I played a lot in the 80’s, and I didn’t touch guitar for 15 years maybe. And I decided to get back into it. And I was an OK player. But I decided I wanted to take it to a new level, I was looking for hobby I could spend time on.”
After playing around for a few months, I decided I needed a teacher. I had taken music theory classes in college. I understood a lot of the basics of music. I felt like I needed a jump start... something to get me going and keep me practicing every day. So, I’d been to the websites and YouTube, on my own, sort of seeking teachers and I came across Tom Hess, saw his videos, and so I gave that a shot.
The online guitar lessons are very high quality lessons, there’s plenty there to keep you going from lessons to lesson, it forces you to practice a lot to keep up with the lessons.
My guitar playing improved immensely! I knew some of the theory, I knew I was a fairly good player, but a lot of this just tied it all together. The typical teacher was just some guy in a band, who was sitting in a music store room, who kind of showed you whatever you asked or what he felt like… there were various techniques used. This is much more professional. You have more of a specific plan the second you walk in, what your goals are, what direction you want to go, you’re kind of mapped throughout your progress and pushed in the right direction.Daniel Kunde, South Beach, Oregon, USA
"I had actually I tried many things before I tried Tom Hess. I’ve taken guitar lessons from many different guitar teachers… some of which were decent, but I surpassed all of them in the end."
And I tried learning from books and from different online places. But in the end, I decided to take correspondence lessons with Tom Hess, because unlike anything else online, or unlike a book, he actually creates a unique lesson plan to address my specific problems.
My guitar playing has improved since taking correspondence lessons with Tom Hess in several areas, but, the main areas that they’ve improved in are being able to improvise over a backing track and visualizing the fretboard, and I’ve also gotten faster at playing since starting lessons with Tom Hess.Chris Hirsch, Ruston, Louisiana, USA
“Honestly, a lot of the guitar teachers that I took lessons with, they were great at the time, but eventually they just kind of ran out of stuff to show me and teach me or whatever.”
One thing Tom Hess does that a lot of other teachers don’t do is he guides lessons in such a way that they fulfill your personal goals as a musician. Since I start taking lessons with Tom, my playing has gotten a lot cleaner, and he's given me a lot of strategies for building speed on the riffs that I've been having trouble with, and exercises to work out all kinds of different issues that I have in my playing.
Tom’s goal oriented approach really helps to focus your practice into things that you know, honestly things you really want to do. It forces you to really stop and look at, you know, “Hey, I want to get into this style or I want to do this with my musical career, I want to get into this or I want to get into that.” You know just basically whatever directions you choose to go, he gives you the lessons that’ll give you the straight path to that. There’s entirely no BS with other stuff. There’s no useless stuff. It’s all stuff that’s going to help you.Daniel Cruzan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
Neglected Guitar Playing Cleanliness Issue: Not Having Consistent Skills
Inconsistencies in how you attack notes.
To deal with this, record the same guitar pattern 2 times into your closest sound recording app and (if possible) pan one track completely to one side and the other completely to the other side.
After that listen (using headphones ideally) and hear where errors occur. This will be no sweat, because once you notice anything that occurs in one ear/speaker but not in the other, that tells you that you have a problem.
Think about what that mistake is (by giving attention to each recording by itself) and then when you start playing again, make sure to keep that area perfect.
As an example, you may notice that you are likely to play the same part either with different approaches to palm muting. This will mean that you should emphasize your palm muting in that portion of the piece and keep the pressure uniform while playing.
If you detect that one track has string sounds in a specific spot but sounds clean in the other, that means you need to more diligently watch your muting techniques as you play that part in the music to make certain that the noise never occurs.
This makes your aural skills more fine-tuned so that you can become more tuned to your own flaws and correct them.
Do this exercise routine as part of your guitar practice and your playing becomes a lot more tight.
Guitar Practice Exercise For Getting Super Fast & More Clean
Concentrate on hearing your mistakes as you play at faster speeds.
As an example, when you are playing a fast lick at or near your fastest speed and find that your hands aren't together, you need to be able to know which note( s) are not clean as you are actively playing.
To do that, your ability to focus needs to become much more honed.
Work on breaking up hard guitar licks into smaller sized parts of a few notes at once. Then try these few notes at your greatest speed. This makes it a lot easier to find your mistakes.
Another tactic that will help you during faster tempos (most notably with legato) is to go between faster playing and slower playing continuously (in 12 second intervals).
When you only play fast for several minutes at a time, gradually your hand becomes tired and your technique gets sloppy (strengthening bad habits).
So if you go back and forth between slow and fast playing in fast bursts of effort you have the opportunity to alter your muscle memory by assessing the right slow technical motions before playing again at your fastest speed.
This trains you to learn the appropriate motions quickly and ingrain them into your top speeds.
As you start to improve your listening, you will begin observing the exact missteps you make at your fastest speeds (with anything you know how to play) and you know how to deal with them.
Mastering bending technique for guitar gives you the power to create intense emotion every time you pick up your instrument to play. Learn the best way to do it by taking online guitar classes.
Once you've checked out the video above, watch the videos below to see jam sessions and feedback from other guitarists who have worked with me to make massive progress on guitar.