Want to play creative neoclassical guitar licks to make your solos sound amazing?
Love the sound of guitar players like Yngwie Malmsteen or Ritchie Blackmore?
Not sure how to get started?
No problem:
Learning how to play neoclassical guitar licks isn't as hard as you might think...
... and it's a lot of fun too!
Today you are going to learn how to play neoclassical guitar that are easy and sound totally awesome and impressive.
Sound good?
Get started right now by watching this neoclassical guitar licks video and learn how to play your own licks in no time:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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Tip #1: Accent The First Note Of The String Using A Powerful Picking Attack
Accenting the first note of a string with a powerful pick attack is great for keeping your hands in sync.
Why is this important?
Answer:
Keeping your hands in sync is critical whether you are playing neoclassical guitar licks or any other type of lick. This is what helps you play fast and clean.
This has the added benefit of making fast guitar playing feel much easier too.
Picking the first note of a given string with power during a lick helps in these specific ways:
- Emphasizing the first note makes it easier for your hands to stay in synchronization because you process it more clearly in your head.
- Due to making less mistakes because your hands are in sync, practicing/playing guitar becomes less frustrating so you can focus on having fun.
- The notes you play are higher overall quality.
- It's easier to improve the quality of your licks one note at a time by using this approach to ensure that a single note is picked clearly and accurately (by switching your focus to different notes).
Tip #2: Challenge Yourself To Pick In Creative Note Rhythms
Neoclassical guitar licks commonly involve picking an open string as the pedal, then playing fretted notes (in harmonic minor for example) to fill out the phrase.
Learning how to pick in creative note rhythms or meter helps make your neoclassical licks sound more creative.
For instance:
Try picking an open string in a four note pattern (4 beats per measure) where the first beat is always emphasized with a powerful pick attack.
Use this idea at both slow and fast tempos.
This forces you to think in more detail about every note you play.
Increase the challenge and the creative potential of your playing using more complex rhythms.
For example, emphasize the first beat in an uneven amount of beats such as 5 or 7.
This actually causes you to pay closer attention to what you are doing, since it is harder to play like this on autopilot.
This style of practicing is great for develop your guitar playing in other areas too such as tremolo picking technique.
Try practicing tremolo picking technique in this way by picking any notes from one of the neoclassical guitar licks you learned in brief bursts of a few notes at a time, with a brief moment of rest in between each repetition. Then emphasize various notes and move forward to use more notes in the pattern.
Tip #3: Find A Great Guitar Teacher To Develop Your Lead Guitar Skills
Do you spend countless hours looking around the intenet to find new guitar licks, videos or guitar practice exercises to improve your guitar skills?
Many guitar players do this too.
That said:
There is a much more efficient solution to help you reach your guitar playing goals.
Solution:
Make the entire process of improving your guitar playing easier by getting help from an expert guitar teacher.
Your neoclassical guitar licks and overall guitar playing skills massively improve and become more creative when you take lessons with someone who can guide you throughout the learning process.
Guitarists who take lessons from a teacher spend much less time being frustrated by their mistakes because they know exactly how to get better. Great teachers are critical for helping you identify problems in your guitar playing that you simply wouldn't have seen on your own.
Don't make the mistake of hesitating to begin taking guitar lessons from a teacher - This will most likely be the most beneficial decision for your playing that you could ever take.
The sooner you make this choice, the less time stands in between you and achieving the things you always wanted to achieve on guitar, while having a great time throughout the journey getting there.
So it's time to make the right choice for your guitar playing and begin taking guitar lessons today.
Want proof?
See what my students have to say about taking guitar lessons:
“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…”
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... 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
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When I started learning from Tom, the main thing that made him different from other teachers was that he was showing me how to excel in all aspects of my guitar playing by applying the skills that I already knew together with the new material that I was learning from him.
He made me aware of both strengths and weaknesses in my playing that I did not even know I had. From there he gave me the knowledge, tools and guidance to literally transform my guitar playing by enabling me to overcome things that were preventing me from becoming a truly creative and self-expressive guitar player. These were the kinds of things that none of my previous guitar teachers and books I studied were able to do for me.
After Tom made me aware of all the things I was missing in my guitar playing and provided me with the strategy and tools for solving them, I began to make very fast progress in all areas of my guitar playing.
I can now write my own music and can create lead guitar solos that I am happy and fulfilled with. I also have the technical skills to confidently and easily play anything that I want to express. I have overcome all of the lead guitar challenges that I struggled with before, and increased my guitar speed to virtuoso levels. More importantly, I have the knowledge and understanding of how to continually improve my guitar playing and musical skills to higher and higher levels to continue expressing myself with my music. Overall, I have definitely transformed in a huge way as a musician and as a person through my lessons with Tom Hess. I am grateful to him for guiding me towards becoming the guitarist I always wanted to be!"
Mike Philippov, Indiana, USA
“When I first heard about Tom Hess, I saw that he was a teacher that was very dedicated and serious about it, and that drew me in immediately. That this is a guy that has a plan, has a goal and really if you’re serious about learning guitar, this guy is equally as serious in a way. So it resonated with me straight away.”
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I started out just learning by myself and as many others I got stuck. I had a few issues I wanted to get by, but when I met Tom and talked with him and started lessons with him, he opened up a whole new world of possibilities of what guitar playing can be.
I feel very grateful that I found lessons from Tom since I then did what worked from the very beginning. Many guitarists I see that played way longer than I did, they have build up many bad habits. That from the very start, there was clear instruction of how to practice correctly. You build the ability for high speed and whatever you want from the very beginning and you don’t waste time doing inefficient things. So I’m very grateful that I did that, and now I really feel I am able to reach whatever level I want.
The reasons why I think I feel so motivated all the time is because I know that the thing I’m working on is relevant for me and it’s exactly the direct thing I need to get.
The forum just kicks ass. The people in the forum - it’s just like unconditional help all the time. They love to help out, and you also get very inspired by seeing someone just really getting speed really quick and then you say if he can do it, I can do it. It works on the mental side of being a guitarist and that of course that’s the most important thing. Just being around other musicians like that, is just you learn so much faster, is so much less frustration when you can see that all the people are having the same issues that you do, not anything special or anything. It’s just part of learning process, so it kicks ass.
Magnus Gautestad, Norway
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