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Playing lead guitar seems like the next logical step to getting some skills in rhythm playing. You might need to focus more on the quality of your playing when you switch to single note solos and lead guitar licks. To start playing lead guitar you will need to be familiar with the notes on the guitar fretboard. This might seem like a big job but it only takes a few minutes a day of finding the notes and playing them in all positions.

You will need to add sessions of alternate picking using scales to your daily guitar practice. Your picking technique is the basis of your lead guitar playing but there are other techniques like string bending and skipping as well as hammer-ons, pull-offs and string tapping.

If you are a rock or blues guitarist you will need to know the minor pentatonic and the blues scale. The blues scale is only the minor pentatonic scale with an added flattened fifth. You can also add a flattened third or seventh.

If you can make or download a twelve bar blues backing track to play in front of, just play the notes of the scale in any order, experimenting with your blue notes. You will gradually get the feel of playing solos as you start to break free from the scale structure and use licks to make your guitar speak.

Another way of practicing playing lead guitar is to focus on the notes you find in the chords. Start by making sure you have the notes firmly in your head, and play them in any order with your backing track playing.

You could devote some time each day to discovering playing lead guitar using arpeggios. This simply involves fingering chord shapes and playing them as single notes. You simply hold the chord shape and play the strings up from the sixth and down from the first, then in random order.

If you have not already learnt to read guitar tabs, you should start now. It only takes half an hour to get the basic idea, and learning tab will allow you to tap into all the lead guitar solos that other guitarists have written in tab and shared on the internet. You can find tabs on tablature archive sites, and you could also check out forums to see if the members post tabs of their work. And don’t forget that guitar magazines are still alive and well, so take a look at any regular tab features they might be running.

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When we learn guitar solos, we have the choice between learning the music from conventional music notation or from guitar tab. Although tab was used for all music in past ages it has become popular as guitar notation because people who were attracted to playing the guitar were very often not attracted to spending time learning music theory and how to read sheet music.

Quite often, a newbie guitarist’s inspiration to learn to play the guitar is the lead guitar player in a famous band. Hearing a great solo guitar player at work raises so many questions about the techniques he uses, the tone and volume settings, and where he gets those great guitar solos from.

In this age of instant gratification, you can find the tab for a guitar solo almost as soon as the song is released. To take advantage of the tabs on the internet you need to be aware that the guitar tab can tell you one thing: the notes that the guitarist is playing in the solo.

If you play the tab through you may not agree with the notes that are on the tab, so this is the time to make any changes that you feel are necessary. Once you feel that the guitar solo tab corresponds to your hearing of the solo on the CD version of the song, you need to check the fingering that is given.

If the guitar tab has been written manually using Notepad or a similar text editor, the fingering given will have been worked out by the guitarist who wrote the tab. If you are using a file from some guitar editing software like Powertab, you need to check the fingering thoroughly to make sure it is easy for you to play.

The reason you need to check the fingering is that tab editing programs have no idea what it feels like to have fingers, and if you follow the computer-generated fingering, you might be in for some unnecessary acrobatics. So remember to keep it simple.

So, there is no harm in being flexible in interpreting the tab for any guitar solo. If you feel that what’s on the tab does not sound quite right, go with what you have. Once you’re familiar with the music, the correct notes or chord will probably come to you. Also, do not be afraid to take liberties with any guitar solo you are learning. When you are up there playing the music on your guitar, it will be YOUR solo, so you can change it to make it your own if you like.

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If you have been wondering what rhythm guitar is and how it fits into a band, then this article should help you. Let’s start with the fact that playing rhythm guitar is not a hard and fast style of playing. After all, a band is a group of musicians who may or may not stick with the conventions of popular music when they are writing their material. For instance a lead guitarist might decide to do some chord strumming and the rhythm player could indulge in some picking – a reversal of roles according to the way we usually think of how bands work.

There is no set division between lead and rhythm guitar but the rhythm player’s job is mostly to form part of the rhythmic structure of a song. The rhythm guitar parts are usually very simple and serve to add body to the sound of the music.

To try and define the basic roles of the two guitar players, we can take the sheet music or tablature of a song with chords marked and play the song through using just one guitar playing the chords marked on the music. What you have just played is the rhythm guitar part. If there is any other guitar sound in the song, strictly speaking,  it’s the lead guitar.

So if you are interested in playing rhythm guitar you could start listening to your favorite bands and trying to catch the rhythm part. Another way is to go back in time to when the guitar parts were more easily defined than they are now. Bands from past generations like The Shadows, The Who, The Beatles and The Moody Blues are obvious examples.

Another approach to learning about playing rhythm is to listen not to guitar players but drummers and bass players. Get a feel for the rhythm of a song and see if you can play along using chord strumming. Your aim should be to fill a necessary role in the music’s rhythm.

As far as actually playing rhythm guitar, you could try turning your volume control down slightly to give yourself a chance to experiment without making any embarrassing noise and to play harder and more expressively. As you progress in your rhythm playing you could experiment with muting strings with your left or right hand or both, and also you might benefit by not strumming all six strings, leaving some of the music to the lead and bass player.

The lead guitarist usually plays solo breaks or extended solos during a song and is not bound to follow the basic rhythm of the song if he finds it more interesting to move in and out of the rhythm.

Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all the resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.

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