Learn How Practice Lead Guitar To Make Your Solos More Musical
Getting lead guitar technique that sounds great doesn't always require tons of speed and technical playing. Sometimes it's as easy as knowing how to play a few notes with good phrasing so your solos sound musical. Many guitarists never focus on this and taking just a few minutes to learn how it's done makes your playing so much better.
Watch the guitar practice video below and learn how to use this approach in your lead guitar playing, so you can quickly become a better guitarist:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Now you know how to make your guitar solos sound more creative and musical.
Learn more ways to play better guitar solos, phrases and licks by using these ideas:
How To Make Your Guitar Speed Practice More Effective And Enjoyable
It’s boring and ineffective when you practice guitar like most guitarists.
Most guitar players waste a lot of their time and use practice methods that do not help them build speed or enjoy what they are doing.
A lot of guitarists become disinterested in their practice when they continually repeat scales, licks or exercises over and over. When you do this, know that you’re practicing ineffectively. Practicing guitar like this is a demonstration that you lack the understanding of what it takes to fix mistakes and advance your guitar playing.
When you do this, you are really only wasting your time and (even worse) reinforcing bad habits that have to be fixed later on.
Effective practice keeps your mind focused on mastering guitar technique fundamentals. When you do this, you don’t even notice the time slipping by. You feel yourself making progress daily and practicing becomes more fun.
Doing these things makes practicing to increase speed more effective and fun:
Practice To Become More Consistent
When you are only able to play a practice item a few times before you make mistakes… you know you haven’t mastered it. Many guitarists only seek to play an item one or two times before moving on to something else.
When you do this, your playing becomes inconsistent. Practice by playing an item perfectly for at least 10 times continuously. Doing this helps you find mistakes that only pop up when you repeat an idea many times.
Understanding what these mistakes are and how they are holding you back helps you know what to prioritize in your practice. This makes your practice more focused and effective at getting the results you want.
Isolate Your Mistakes
Don’t waste your time practicing the aspects of a guitar lick, phrase or solo that you have already mastered. Identify the specific notes that are giving you problems. Then determine why you are making mistakes with these notes.
Once you do this, you are able to practice them in isolation until your technique becomes refined and the problem is fixed.
Learn The Right Elements To Practice
Finding the correct elements you must practice to master technique and develop speed makes your practice effective and efficient.
The best way to do this is to find a great guitar teacher who can show you exactly what to work on to reach your goals.
The One Important Thing To Practice On Guitar When You Don’t Have A Lot Of Time
You get more results from guitar practice when you work on things that have a lot of transferability. In other words: practice items that help you improve many areas of your playing at a time.
The most crucial thing to work on when you only have little time to practice is cleaning up your guitar playing. This has a lot of transferability.
When you make your guitar playing cleaner, you eliminate mistakes that occur in ALL aspects of your playing. You get amazing results to improve your guitar playing when you do this… even if you only spend ten minutes per day practicing it.
Perform the steps of the exercise below to clean up your guitar playing:
Step #1 – Select a practice item you want to make much cleaner.
Step #2 – Play through this practice item for one minute straight while focusing on any mistakes you are making.
Step #3 – Take 4 minutes to write down all of the mistakes you noticed from the previous step. Be as specific as possible.
Note: Practicing guitar effectively requires you to pinpoint the specific causes to sloppy guitar playing. Many guitar players do not look deep enough when trying to fix mistakes in their playing.
This leads them to practice incorrectly and inefficiently. For example, you might notice that your scales sound sloppy and just assume you haven’t played through them enough.
In reality, the sloppiness could be due to a lack of synchronization in both hands (due to not mastering the movements at slower speeds), ineffective string muting in one or both hands and many other possibilities.
Working with an experienced guitar teacher helps you pinpoint the specific causes to your mistakes so you fix them fast.
Step #4 – Use the remaining 5 minutes to work on cleaning up the mistakes you wrote down from the previous step. If there are several big mistakes, divide up your time to work on them based on which one needs the most work.
Working through this exercise for just 10 minutes per day improves all areas of your guitar playing fast.
You also make faster progress by working with a guitar teacher like these students chose to do:
“I just love guitar lessons with Tom, he literally takes the time to make a specific lesson plan and sends you lessons as you need it.”
My last lesson I took with a local guitar teacher before joining Tom, I was struggling with a sweep picking pattern, which was the 5 string root major, I was really struggling to get the rolling technique down. I took it to my guitar teacher and I was like “Help me with this, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” This is his exact phrase: “At high speeds, it doesn’t really matter if you can play it clean or not, no one can hear it anyway.” At that point, I was just like, “Ah man.” But thankfully, in that same message, he mentioned Tom’s name. Then the doors opened. That very night, I went home and looked at every single lesson Tom had, had my guitar in hand, every YouTube lesson on you know “correct motions”, “play this over chords”... just applied it instantly, and it was instant results within an hour... just from his free stuff. I was like, oh man, I’ve got to do lessons with this guy.
I remember when I first started out with lessons, I instantly jumped on the forum to greet myself, and it’s amazing how there’s like 30 responses. Just like, “Hi welcome.” and stuff... “Hi Dan, great musical tastes”. That made me feel really at home and welcomed into Tom’s forum and community. Every time I’ve had an issue when I was first starting out be it like theory or technique, there’s always been someone there who’s helped. Otherwise it could’ve been this potentially awkward process where I’d have to wait a whole week to get an answer from my teacher, who even then may not have answered it correctly and may have never solved it. Whereas there are guys on there who have been with Tom and have been through exactly what I’ve been through. They know exactly how to help, in what order, what information you need... it’s just a friendly atmosphere really.
Dan Mayhew, Stowmarket, UK
“July of 2012, I had been managing in a retail store and was kind of reaching this point where I was really getting frustrated because I had been struggling to progress in my guitar playing. I had this mindset that I had to teach myself everything... you know and the best players are all self taught and stuff like that...”
...and I remembered Tom Hess from that book, and I said “You know, it’s time to look this guy up and see what he’s all about.” And it didn’t take me very long to figure out that this is the kind of person that I needed to get on board with.
My playing has definitely improved technique-wise, but probably the most important change I have experienced is just in my overall mindset as a player and as a practicing musician. I just feel like I have a much better frame of mind and a much better idea of where I am going and where my guitar practicing is taking me. Whereas before I just felt like I had to practice everything and I had a whole bunch of stuff going on. It’s a lot more focused now.
Being in the environment that Tom has created with his other students is incredibly motivating. I had always been in my own little shell, kind of just stayed on my own. Coming out here... like when I came out here last year was a big step out of my comfort zone. Getting around all these other musicians... it’s unbelievable how great some of these guys are, not just as players, but as people.
Andrew Tintle, Richmond, California USA
“I had problems with physical playing. I couldn’t hold the pick, I was struggling a lot, there was frustration for like years. I started out looking for a YouTube solution, maybe someone knows how to angle the pick or build up speed and accidentally ran into Tom.”
The video wasn’t about playing, he only had a conversation. I listened up to him. I saw that Tom made a lot of sense in his speech, and I got interested. I went to his site, started looking at what he offered, got very interested, filled out the form, got my first lesson, started building up myself and started getting more results than I was getting before when I was self taught. It was an amazing experience that opened up so many doors, and still there are so many doors to open.
The material is specifically done for your individual needs, to reach your goals. You can always put up new goals. You can have feedback on your playing, see your weak areas and strong areas. Tom cares a lot about his students. He always reviews and watches how I am progressing so we can review material, step by step. Not skipping the steps. He is paying attention to it, and that’s what I like about it. I last felt this kind of motivation when I was 13 and starting out with a band, now I’m feeling the same fire and passion. There are students who are more advanced, more knowledgeable and have more experience. Instead of feeling jealous, I feel much more motivated to push myself further.
Freddy Kuiva, Estonia
Along with a guitar teacher, effective progress tracking tools are critical for getting better fast. Here are just a couple testimonials from students of mine who track their progress:
"The Guitar Playing Accelerator helps me because it measures things that I never even though to measure. When you’re on the accelerator, it’s very quick, you see, “Ah I thought I knew this… I thought I knew this subject really well... this area really well” ... and either you do or you don’t. And when you get your final score, you see exactly how much work you have left to do, which can be excited or depressing."
The Guitar Playing Accelerator helps you make more progress because you see the areas that your deficient in. You see what’s weak, what needs to be improved and how to improve it.
The thing I like the most about the Guitar Playing Accelerator is that viewing things in ways or looking at the guitar in ways that I don’t when I’m just practicing regularly. So I’m doing chord inversions in weird parts of the neck makes me think okay, I have to be on top of what notes are, where looking at the fretboard and understanding and doing it quickly. So that’s something that on my own I’d have never done.
The top 3 reasons I recommend the Guitar Playing Accelerator is you’ll see an immediate jump up in everything... you’ll do it the first week and you’ll get your baseline for where you are. You’ll come back the very next week and without even realizing it, you’ll be better. You’ll know more. You’ll answer things faster. You’ll look at the guitar differently. You’ll just be better. And next week, you’ll be even better and then better and better. The more you keep doing it, it’s like a snowball effect.
Byron Marks, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA
"Using the guitar player accelerator has been awesome because there were a lot of areas that I didn’t know how to track or that I should even be tracking my results of that area, and so it’s made it a lot easier because now I have that knowledge."
Now I know where I’m getting better, how much I’m getting better, what areas I need to work on more, and I don’t have to ask myself why am I not getting better anymore, because when I look at the data that I have there, it becomes really easy to figure out where I need to go and what I need to do.
I recommend using the Guitar Playing Accelerator because: 1. If you don’t track what you’re doing with your guitar playing, you’re not going to be able to measure it, and you’re not going to be able to improve. And if you aren’t keeping an eye on those things, then you aren’t going to know what weaknesses you have. It’s going to be a lot harder to identify what weaknesses you have and if those weaknesses are preventing you from using the strengths in your playing. So without that, it really makes it hard to identify exactly what you need to do. The other one is the bonuses actually. The bonuses that we get with the Guitar Playing Accelerator are worth more than what you pay for the accelerator itself. So, the bonuses are huge and I love getting those cause they’re awesome.
Brad Litton, Vernal, Utah, USA
Ready to make your guitar solos sound technical and emotionally expressive? Learn how to do it from an expert by taking electric guitar online lessons.