Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Lead Guitar Lesson : Starting Out With Guitar Solos

By Nick Dillon


Would you like to play lead guitar, but you're not sure where to start? This lead guitar lesson hopefully will explain the easiest and quickest way to get started with lead guitar and improvisation. Improvising relies upon playing the right sounding notes over the musical backing piece or backing track. The question is; how do you know what notes will sound good? Well, it's actually pretty easy, but to many people the idea of learning scales is a little scary, difficult or just plain boring. There is no way around it, if you want to improvise on the guitar, the easiest way is to know a few basic scales and how to apply them.

If you want to play lead guitar and improvise, you'll have to learn the minor pentatonic scale. This is the single most important tip from this lead guitar lesson. This one scale alone seems to be the most popular for rock and blues as well as many other genres of music. If you had to pick one scale to learn for guitar soloing, this would be the best choice.

The minor pentatonic scale is one of the most commonly used scales for guitar solos. When you hear a guitar solo, chances are it most likely contains the notes of the minor pentatonic scale. This scale is used extensively in rock and blues as well as many other genres of music.

Simply by adding a note or two to the minor pentatonic scale you can create many other scales. It is the fundamental scale that many others are built from. These include the Aeolian mode also known as the natural minor scale as well as the blues scale and Dorian mode. These modes and scales are very useful for lead guitarists in and will be discussed in more detail in future lead guitar lessons.

By learning the minor pentatonic scale, it is very easy to learn the major pentatonic scale as well. Both scales form identical scale shapes on the fretboard, the only difference is the position of the shapes and the root notes. This scale is also very useful for improvisation and lead guitar.

The minor pentatonic scale is extremely versatile. It is one of the few scales in music that can be played over minor and major chord progressions. When applied properly you could play it over almost any chord progression and it will sound good in most cases.

It is important to mention in this lead guitar lesson that the minor pentatonic scale is very easy to learn. It only contains five notes which form simple box shapes when mapped out on the fretboard. Start by learning these shapes, and once you know them, simply add additional notes to create other scales and modes. Learning this scale will establish a solid foundation for all future lead guitar playing and improvising.




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