How To Easily Play Cool Pentatonic Licks For Guitar That Sound Impressive

Tired of playing the same pentatonic licks for guitar that you always play?

Looking for new pentatonic guitar licks that sound impressive and make your playing feel more expressive?

Good news:

You're about to learn some killer pentatonic licks for guitar that are fun, easy and don't require having tons of speed to make them sound great!

Sound interesting?

Thought so!

Get new pentatonic guitar licks that sound great and make your soloing more impressive by watching this video:

Click on the video to begin watching it.

Using the pentatonic guitar licks in the video gives you tons of new ideas to improve your leads and solos.

Now that you understand how to play cool, new pentatonic guitar licks - what's the next step?

Answer:

Learn how to make pentatonic licks for guitar that sound more creative and expressive.

Use these tips to improve your guitar licks and start playing with more creativity:

Tip #1: How To Make Your Pentatonic Guitar Licks Sound Better

Pentatonic guitar licks don't sound very musically expressive when you try to play your own ideas?

When you think of your own new pentatonic guitar licks, stay with each musical motif a bit longer before moving onto another.

(Don't do what many guitarists do, which is constantly re-invent the wheel by moving on too fast from one idea to another.)

Here are a few easy ways to do this:

Insert silence here and there in your phrases to create anticipation for what is to come next
Hold some notes longer
Repeat a single note several times using things like tremolo picking, vibrato or palm muting to squeeze more expression from the note

Doing these things easily adds more musical variety into what you are playing while also giving you time to think about what you want to play next.

Tip#2: Use A Variety Of Vibrato Approaches While Soloing With Pentatonic Guitar Scales

There are two ways to remove intense levels of emotion from your pentatonic guitar licks:

Not using vibrato enough
Only using narrow vibrato

Many blues guitarists like narrow vibrato because it is similar to how B.B. King plays, but don't limit yourself to only using this approach.

Here is what to do in order to make your guitar vibrato sound awesome together with the pentatonic guitar scale licks you learned in the video:

Practice slowly playing through each note of any of the licks you learned. As you do this, pick a note you want to emphasize and apply vibrato to it using vibrato that is one whole step wide and fast. Notice how intense this style feels compared to narrow vibrato that is fast, but a half step or smaller in width.

Apply wide and other styles of vibrato to the note you chose for 5-10 repetitions while doing so in a different way each time.

Then choose another note.

After going through this process for just a few minutes you will notice yourself starting to build a vocabulary of vibrato types you can use to improve your pentatonic guitar licks (or any lick in general). Keep this in mind and use what you learn to add mroe expressive options into your lead guitar playing.

Common Question: Should You Learn How To Get Better On Guitar Alone Or With A Teacher?

Every guitar player gets to the point where they want to improve but don't know how to do it.

Problem is, a lot of guitarists try learning everything on guitar by themselves. This means they simply guess about what they need to practice or take advice from random sources.

Don't end up in this same spot.

Make the right decision for your guitar playing by taking guitar lessons with a teacher as soon as possible.

It's much easier to get unstuck in your guitar playing when you have problems when you have an expert there to show you what to do differently.

This makes trying to get better at guitar feel fun and motivating instead of frustrating and tedious.

Taking lessons with a guitar teacher is essential for helping you get better because:

You save tons of time fixing things you never even knew you needed to fix. This includes practice approaches where you are overlooking mistakes, using ineffective practice methods or are operating on bad habits.
You have someone there to inspire and motivate you to get better.
You get a clear path towards progress, made by someone who has helped others achieve your same musical goals.

When you are ready to make a lot of progress on guitar, get started taking lessons with a teacher. Doing this gets you results like what my guitar students got:

“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 lead 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 came to Tom for online guitar lessons, I already had a decent overall level of technique and understood the basics of music theory pretty well. I had taken lessons with other teachers before, and went through several guitar method books that promised to teach me how to become a great lead guitar player. I learned all the materials in these books and courses and picked up some useful tips and knowledge along the way. Yet for some reason I still wasn't feeling like a musician. I struggled very much with writing my own songs, creating my own solos and pushing my guitar technique and speed to a higher level (especially sweep picking, alternate picking, and playing clean at high speeds).

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 lead 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 lead guitar licks 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 lead guitar licks 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

“You’re dealing with one of the best guitar teachers in the world, maybe the best and you can’t get that just anywhere in the world.”

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I wanted to really focus much more on getting the technique down, with the integration Tom has of bringing in the other aspects such as theory, improvisation or songwriting so it all integrates and ties together. You get a comprehensive package so that you not only learn the technique, you’re really applying it in many different ways... in ways that are going to be much more useful, rather than your average internet lesson where the guy just explains something or shows you how to do it. Tom tells you how to do something and how to apply and use it in many different ways.

Tom is so goal focused, and I hadn’t even thought of that, it changed the way I thought of things. Tom makes you come up with musical goals and works towards fulfilling those goals. You have something to focus on, the lessons are based on meeting those goals. You’re getting better, you can see how you’re getting better and then you build new goals after that. You see the growth and development as opposed to just getting a little better at a certain technique. You’re actually developing.

Mike Larson, Milwaukee, USA

Learning to play new guitar licks feels awesome, but there is much more to becoming a killer guitar player than this - Take your lead guitar playing to the highest level with these electric guitar lessons online: