Tuesday 22 March 2011

Lead Guitar Lesson : Where to Start Learning Lead Guitar

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.

Now, if you're playing the guitar, you absolutely, positively, without a doubt, have to learn the minor pentatonic scale. This is the most important tip from this lead guitar lesson. This scale is the centre of the rock and blues universe and is also used in many other genres of music. If you had to pick one scale to learn for guitar, this would be the best choice - hands down. There are so many scales used in music, why this one?

The minor pentatonic scale is used frequently for guitar solos. Chances are, when you hear a guitar solo on the radio, it most likely contains the notes of the minor pentatonic scale. This scale is used commonly in blues, rock and many other types 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 extremely easy to also learn the major pentatonic scale at the same time. The scale shapes on the fretboard are the same for both scales, the shapes simply sit in a different position as too do the root notes. The major pentatonic scale is also a very useful scale for lead guitarists.

The minor pentatonic is an extremely versatile scale. It is one of the few scales that can be played over major and minor keys. When applied properly you could play it over most chord progressions and it will sound good more times than not.

The final point in this lead guitar lesson is probably the most important one. The minor pentatonic scale is very easy to learn because it only contains five notes. When these notes are arranged on the fretboard they form five simple box shape patterns. By learning these box shape patterns you can add additional notes to create other scales very easily. It is important to thoroughly learn this scale as it is the easiest way to get started with lead guitar and will form a solid foundation for all future lead guitar playing.




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