Lead Guitar Playing Emotion: Why You Lack It And What To Do About It

“Musical expression” is a skill like any other. You can practice it, improve it and master it…if you go about it the right way. Likewise, you can keep struggling to express yourself with your lead guitar playing if you neglect this skill, or practice it incorrectly and ineffectively.

Here are 4 most common mistakes that suppress lead guitar playing emotion and how to avoid them:

Lead Guitar Playing Emotion Mistake #1: Having The Wrong Focus

The vast majority of guitar players focus their attention on what notes (or guitar licks) to play vs. how to play them in the most expressive way possible.

Most think that if a lick doesn’t sound good, they have to change some or all of its notes to make it cool and expressive. Guitar licks can become an amazingly expressive if you know how to mine the “emotional gold” from it.

Watch this video to learn how to do this:

Understand that the notes of lead guitar licks make up (at most) only half of the guitar playing emotion they express. The other half (or more) is determined by how you play those notes.

Lead Guitar Playing Emotion Mistake #2: Not Pushing Yourself To Be Creative

Most guitarists think that “lead guitar playing emotion” is only made by bending strings and adding some vibrato. They often stop practicing guitar licks they learn way too soon, long before going through ALL the guitar phrasing options, such as:

• Using more than one style of vibrato (there are at least 4 types of vibrato you must explore and master - more on this below).
• Creating multiple variations of guitar licks using string bends
• Articulating the notes in different ways (picking all the notes vs. using legato and vice versa)
• Using creative slides to achieve dozens of expressive phrasing variations
• Changing the rhythm of the notes in creative ways
• …and many more possibilities that most guitarists never explore, simply because they don’t challenge their creative mind to discover them.

Your lead guitar playing creativity is like a muscle - you must push yourself daily to develop it if you want it to grow.

Test your guitar playing emotion expression skills. Take the short lick below and see if you can come up with at least 12 ways to play these notes in cool ways that all sound different and expressive:

Hear variations

If you struggled to come up with a lot of cool sounding variations, you are not alone -  most guitarists find this hard to do. The good news is that you can easily improve this area of your guitar playing and become a much more expressive musician. To learn how to do this, get this free eBook about adding fire and emotion to your guitar licks.

Lead Guitar Playing Emotion Mistake #3: Taking Vibrato For Granted

When it comes to practicing vibrato for lead guitar playing emotion, guitarists fall into 3 groups:

Group 1: Guitarists who don’t practice vibrato at all.

Group 2: Guitarists who practiced vibrato in the past but stopped working on it, because they think they already mastered it. This assumption makes it impossible to fully express yourself with your guitar playing. 

Group 3: Guitar players who consistently focus on refining their vibrato (even after they already know how to do it well). These guitarists improve their lead guitar skills a lot faster and become masters of guitar playing emotion expression.

To master lead guitar playing emotion expression, schedule time for practicing your vibrato as you would practice any other technique. Read this article about practicing vibrato on guitar to learn how to do this.

To make faster progress, seek out an expert guitar teacher who can show you how to master vibrato and integrate this technique with other lead guitar skills to make your guitar solos sound awesome.

Lead Guitar Playing Emotion Mistake #4: Ignoring The Most Important Notes In Your Guitar Licks

Lead guitar licks you play sounds only as good as its final note. Most listeners won’t be able to remember every note in your solos, but they WILL remember the sound of the last note in all the guitar licks you play.

Most people practice guitar playing the notes that lead up to the final note cleanly and accurately, but fail to make the last note sound awesome. This makes it impossible to express strong guitar playing emotion. To fix this problem, focus specifically on ornamenting the final note of your guitar licks as you saw and heard in the examples shown earlier in this article.

Now that you are aware of the most common mistakes that get in the way of lead guitar playing emotion, learn how to practice to add fire to your guitar licks and solos…even if you can’t play guitar fast yet. Download this free eBook about playing awesome guitar licks and learn how to maximize the expressiveness of your guitar playing.