Etobicoke Guitar School

Systematize your practicing, especially if what you’re working on is mentally taxing. Do a repetition, take a short break, do another repetition, break, and so on and so forth. If building speed in lead guitar playing, this may look like playing your lick for 1 or 2 bars (however long it is), and then you take the same number of bars as a rest.



This gives you a chance to mentally recharge, gives your hands a break, and think about and assess what you just played. This decreases your chance of burning yourself out, and enables you to practice the same item for longer.

You have to KNOW that lick or scale in order to play it in all 12 keys. If you can play it smoothly in every key, then that lick becomes significantly more usable to you since your lead playing is no longer limited by what chords you’re soloing over.

An efficient strategy for solving technique problems in fast lead guitar playing is to keep the metronome at the same speed, but change the note values of your lick/run to half time (quarter notes become half notes, sixteenths become eighths, etc.).



This doesn’t solve the problems themselves, but it slows you down enough where you can look at the finer motions happening in your hands that enable you to play more cleanly, compare them to your faster speed, and see where the problem may be occurring.

Thick guitar picks (1.14mm and up) are ideal for fast lead guitar playing, as they don’t “give” into the strings before plucking them. This means you’ll get an immediate response when striking the string, which is crucial for your ripping shred solo!

Guitar picks come in all shapes, sizes and materials. Experiment with different picks and see what feels most comfortable in your hands. It might change over the years, and that’s okay too.



Do you have a favourite pick? I use Clayton Acetal picks (the big triangle ones), at thicknesses of both 1.52mm and 1.26mm.

How to make your soloing sound more melodic?



Well, a question for you – how reliant are you on the backing track to make you sound good? It’s easy to relax and feel good when the chord progression you’re playing over is great. But if you practice soloing over 1 CHORD ONLY, now that comfort is gone and you have no choice but to exercise your own skills and knowledge to make melodies, whether you use theory, your ears or scale sequences to help you.



It’s not the only way to make your soloing more melodic, but it’s a great one.

When fitting a new guitar lick into your lead playing, you need to account for the rhythm of the lick. Find the beat of the track you're soloing over, and make sure the rhythmic values of all the notes you play are on point. This will likely involve changing the speed of the lick itself, to adapt it to the music. This will make the difference between your soloing sound tight and constructed, as opposed to a mess of random notes.

You don’t need to pull the string with all your might to create a clean pull-off. You just need to remove the finger in a way that subtly flicks the string. It doesn’t take much, and shouldn’t look too different from taking your fingers off the string in general.

Getting clean hammer-ons in your lead guitar playing is not so much about how hard you press the strings down, but how fast your fingers come down on them. If your finger is too slow, there will be a brief moment in time where your fingertip mutes the string and stops it from vibrating, before the new note is fully fretted. This will prevent the new note from resonating.

How to smoothly switch between rhythm and lead guitar?



A great place to start is to play 4 simple downstrokes on a chord, and then 4 notes of a scale (or the melody you’re playing), and go back and forth with them. As you do that, focus on keeping the chords and notes in time (it doesn’t have to be fast in the beginning), and keeping excess string noise quiet as you transition. From there, you can increase the tempo, go double time with the lead guitar notes, turn the downstrokes into a strumming pattern or palm mute rhythm, etc.