Lead Guitar Phrasing – How To Make Your Guitar Playing Sound Pro
Emotion To Any Guitar Lick
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In this article, I show you how to master what is – in my experience – the #1 skill in all of guitar playing:
Your guitar phrasing.
Sure, the notes you play are important... your technique is important too.
But nothing is more important than how you play the notes in your guitar riffs and lead guitar licks and guitar solos.
(That is what guitar phrasing is.)
When you have great guitar phrasing, everything you play on guitar sounds good (even when you cannot play any fast or flashy guitar licks).
But when you don’t?
Then your playing sounds amateur even if you play fast and clean.
These are the very same insider secrets I’ve taught to thousands of my guitar students (as well as to guitar teachers I coach how to teach ‘their’ students) to help them play like pros while practicing like hobbyists.
Emotion To Any Guitar Lick
EMAIL TO GET ACCESS
By submitting your info, you agree to send it to Tom Hess Music Corporation who will process and use it according to their privacy policy.
To begin, I will show you the elements that go into great guitar phrasing...
Next, I’ll show you how to practice each one, so you can master this area faster than you’d ever believe.
Check out the video below that shows you what lead guitar phrasing is all about:
Now that you know the fundamentals of lead guitar phrasing, let’s go deeper:
Here are the main elements that make guitar phrasing sound great and how to practice to improve each one:
Lead Guitar Phrasing Element #1: Emotional Guitar String Bends
String bends are a crucial part of lead guitar playing that add a ton of fire and emotion to your guitar licks and solos.
Unfortunately, many guitar players falsely think string bends are easy and don’t practice them. This is a big reason why their guitar playing sounds amateurish.
Here is how to make your string bends sound great and pro:
– Focus on your hand position. To bend the string in tune, wrap your thumb around the neck of the guitar and use the spot where your index finger connects to your palm as the pivot point against the bottom of the guitar neck.
Your hand should look like this:
Stick your elbow out (as you can see in the photo) to give your hand even more leverage for bending strings in tune.
– Mute string noise to make your lead guitar playing sound cleaner and guitar phrasing more expressive. To do that, rest your picking hand’s thumb on the lower (thicker) strings as you do string bends and use your index finger (of the fretting hand) to mute the higher (thinner) strings.
This keeps your guitar phrasing (and string bends) clean, improves your lead guitar sustain, and helps to make your phrasing much more expressive.
– Train your intonation consistency. This means practice consistently bending the strings in tune. Here is how: play a note you intend to bend up to (as a regular, unbent note). Then bend into it from one or two frets below until you reach the correct pitch. Repeat this several times until your string bends are consistently in tune.
– Get lots of feedback on your string bends from an expert guitar teacher who can hear tiny flaws in your guitar playing (and guitar phrasing) and help you refine them fast. This is something I do for my guitar students in my personalized Breakthrough Guitar Lessons online.
Many guitar players come to me having struggled with this area of their lead guitar phrasing for years... after I helped them level-up their string bends, their guitar solos began to sound much more emotional quickly.
Another beautiful thing about getting string bends down is that they make it easier to master the next key area of your lead guitar phrasing, which is:
Lead Guitar Phrasing Element #2: Dramatic Lead Guitar Vibrato
Vibrato is the heart and soul of expressive guitar phrasing and it is ‘the’ skill that makes every part of your playing sound pro.
Very few guitar players deliberately work on their vibrato. They assume it simply develops on its own.
Not so.
Here are the key elements of vibrato to work on that make your guitar licks and guitar solos sound awesome:
1. Fretting Hand Technique: Your fretting hand technique for vibrato is the same for vibrato as it is for string bends. This means the lead guitar technique for these 2 elements of guitar phrasing is the same.
The better and more consistent your string bends are, the stronger your foundation for having great vibrato when you solo.
2. Speed & width. The faster the speed of the bends of your vibrato, the wider it ought to be. And the slower it is, the narrower it can be. Fast and narrow vibrato sounds out of control… but wide and slow vibrato sounds like slow bends instead of vibrato.
3. Intonation. The key to great vibrato is keeping the note you're playing in tune. To achieve this, release the string you're applying vibrato to all the way after each pulse of the bend. This ensures that the note you're ornamenting with vibrato is the one the listener hears.
4. Timing. The rhythm of your vibrato can vary depending on the tempo of the song and the style of guitar phrasing you're using. Practice doing vibrato in eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and triplets, focusing on keeping flawless intonation during the note. This video shows how.
5. Sustain. When you're practicing vibrato, concentrate on keeping the note going for several seconds. This gives your ears enough time to analyze the sound of your vibrato and refine your guitar phrasing.
Watch this video that shows you how to do vibrato the right way.
Important tip: Knowing how to do vibrato is the first step. But getting regular feedback on your vibrato is crucial. Don’t assume that you’re doing it correctly when you're learning it for the first time.
I often see (and hear) guitar students doing vibrato with many flaws in their technique (and sound) that they're not able to see or hear… even though they think they're doing it correctly
Case in point:
I once saw a guitar player do vibrato by shaking the string from side to side, thinking he was 'applying rhythmic bends to a note'.
I had to spend some time training him to move the string up and down the right way. And from that, his vibrato improved massively in a matter of minutes. This is just one example (of many) of how expert analysis of your playing can help you improve your guitar phrasing a lot faster.
This is something I can help you with in Breakthrough Guitar Lessons.
But there is a lot more to mastery of guitar phrasing and expressive lead guitar playing than just string bends and vibrato.
Moving right along to:
Lead Guitar Phrasing Element #3: Slides
Just like string bends and vibrato, most lead guitar players underestimate the guitar phrasing power of slides.
If you ask 100 guitar players, they'll tell you that there are just two types of sliding you can do in your guitar licks and guitar solos.
– ascending slides (where you ascend from a lower pitch to a higher pitch)
– and descending slides (where you descend from a higher pitch down to a lower pitch).
They would not tell you about the much more creative guitar phrasing elements of sliding, like:
– backslides (where you play a note, quickly slide up (or down) from it and return back to the original note, the way I show in this lead guitar playing video lesson).
– superslides (where you slide up (or down) by more than an octave, the way I show in this guitar phrasing tutorial)
– rearticulation slides (where you play a note and immediately slide up to that same note from a few frets above or below).
– bent slides (where you slide into a note that's or two frets below the note you want to hear and immediately bend up. This makes your guitar playing and guitar phrasing sound like that of a singer).
Pro tip: the best way to level up your guitar playing with slides is to get feedback on your playing from a guitar teacher who has a great ear and who specializes in helping their students improve their guitar phrasing. Such a teacher will point out new ways you can use slides you probably haven't thought about… and help you refine your guitar phrasing to make it sound much more expressive.
But believe it or not, guitar phrasing isn't just all about the notes. This leads us to the next (very surprising) element of expressive lead guitar playing, which is:
Lead Guitar Phrasing Element #4: Rhythm
How does rhythm apply to lead guitar phrasing? Think about this: if we took away the pitches of the guitar licks, how interesting would the rhythm sound?
For most guitar players, the answer is: not very. All you'd hear in your guitar licks (without pitches) is: a steady stream of 8th notes, 16th notes, quarter notes and (maybe) triplets.
You can dramatically improve your guitar playing creativity (and enhance your guitar phrasing) by thinking of ways to make the rhythm of your guitar licks more creative.
This makes the notes you play (and the phrasing ornaments you use) sound a lot more expressive.
Here are some ways to refine the rhythm of your lead guitar playing:
– Create the rhythm first. Use your hands to clap the rhythm or tap your hand on the table. Create a rhythm you like and then add notes (and guitar phrasing ornaments) to it. This is counter to how most guitarists approach their lead guitar playing, but it will make your guitar licks and solos much more creative.
– Take a guitar lick you already know (one of yours or from another guitar solo) and vary just the rhythm of the notes – keeping the notes and the guitar phrasing the same (as much as possible).
– Use rubato. Rubato means: playing the notes of your guitar licks 'not in strict time'. Instead of playing strict divisions of a strict beat, you’re expanding and stretching the time of the notes. This builds a lot of musical tension in your guitar playing by making your guitar phrasing unpredictable.
This video shows you how to play guitar licks using rubato and make your guitar phrasing sound awesome fast:
When I give feedback to my guitar students on their solos in Breakthrough Guitar Lessons, improving the rhythm of their guitar licks makes them sound better most quickly. (Because I can show them easy ways to sound more pro using rhythm they typically don't think about on their own.)
And now...
I want to show you the best way to put together all the guitar phrasing techniques I just showed you, using a drill that helps you turn even the plainest guitar lick into a pro-level lead guitar phrase using...
Lead Guitar Phrasing Element #5: Refinement
This is where you practice putting together the guitar playing phrasing elements, like this:
1. Play a short and simple guitar lick.
2. Ask yourself what elements of phrasing you could add to one or more of the notes.
3. Add the elements.
4. Ask yourself how emotional the guitar lick sounds on a scale of 1-10.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until the lick sounds and feels like a “10”.
Here is what this process sounds like and looks like:
You now know how simple it is to level up an element of your lead guitar playing most people think you need lots of natural talent for (creativity and lead guitar phrasing).
Now, I want to show you how to ‘install’ natural talent into other parts of your playing, so you can improve faster (without practicing more) and reach levels you may once have thought you need special DNA to reach. I show you how in my free video: How To Install Natural Talent In Your Guitar Playing. Check it out today and discover the guitar playing mastery secrets most guitarists will never know that make everything about guitar easier and more fun.
Now you know the principles of pro-level guitar phrasing. But here is what this article can’t do for you:
It can’t listen to you play, analyze the sound of your phrasing and pinpoint simple ways to make your guitar licks more expressive. But I can easily do this for you in my proven online lessons for rock guitar.
Unlike some other guitar lessons, you don’t get cookie-cutter courses or one-size-fits-all lessons with me.
Everything I give you is personalized to you, your skill level, your goals and who you want to become as a player.
Plus, I give you an almost unheard-of amount of personal support (including live on video) as you practice your lessons – to help you improve fast and enjoy the process of reaching your goals. Want personal feedback on your phrasing? Done. Want laser-guided help with your technique challenges? No problem. Want help with organizing your guitar practice around your busy schedule? You got it.
You’ll never again struggle with not knowing what to practice or feeling unsure if you’re on track to becoming the guitar player you want to be. With my Breakthrough Guitar Lessons, you get complete certainty and massive results. I’ve taught thousands of guitar players to play like they’ve always dreamed of, and you can be next. Begin rock guitar lessons online today.
